Direct
Telephone and e-mail produce the highest response rate at 2.60% and 2.45% for direct marketing media channels for generating leads.
–Direct Marketing Association, November 2006
As a small business owner, I am sure you are familiar with direct marketing. Direct marketing efforts can be focused in a variety of areas. Direct mail campaigns, email solicitations, telemarketing and even door to door promotion.
As valuable as a direct marketing campaign can be, to create loyal customers, and to gauge the potential of a large scale marketing blitz, there also lies the delicate nature of interruptive marketing. This is marketing that is forced onto the customer, and if not well thought out and designed, can have a negative impact on your businesses customer relations.
In order to take full advantage of a direct marketing campaign, you need to start with a database of your customers. Most businesses already have an on-going database of customers, and potential leads, but just having names and addresses, while important, is limiting the potential in how effective your marketing can be. A few things to keep in mind when building your customer database:
- Ordering behaviour - dates, frequency and timing of orders
- Order types - type and quantity of goods or services ordered and their value
- Your total annual sales - the margin on these sales and their payment history
- Distribution details - postcode, type of area (eg urban or rural)
- Personal profile of individual consumers - age, gender and details of their lifestyle or socio-economic status
Having a better understanding of the people you are marketing to is going to allow you the flexibility to better craft your message to your target audience. Also, remember that data-protection and electronic communication laws cover how you hold and use information about customers and potential leads and how you contact them. For more information on your legal responsibilities, see the page in this guide on legal issues and best practice.
We are going to look at the following 4 types of direct marketing and discuss the pros and cons of each.
