Thursday, January 14, 2010

Why use direct marketing

Why use direct marketing
Direct marketing enables communication with targeted groups of consumers and it helps you build profitable customer relationships. It can help you achieve specific objectives such as:

  • Generate new business leads and sales
  • Increase sales from existing customers
  • Re-establish relationships with dormant customers
  • Increase customer loyalty
    Direct marketing is an especially useful tool for small businesses because it allows you to:
  • Focus your resources where they are likely to generate the best results
  • Speak directly to current and potential customers
  • Track and measure how successful your marketing campaigns are
  • Test your marketing campaigns to see which ones work best
    The most common form of direct marketing is direct mail – sending letters to targeted consumer groups through the post. All types of businesses, to acquire and retain customers and encourage sales, use direct mail. If you understand your customers and target your mailing effectively, direct mail can be a highly personal, highly successful form of marketing.
    Another popular form of direct marketing is telemarketing – contacting targeted consumers directly by telephone. Telemarketing does have some significant advantages over direct mail such as:
  • You can gauge the customers interest immediately
  • You can overcome objections more easily
  • You can explain complex messages more effectively
    Telemarketing is particularly useful in business-to-business (B2B) marketing as people are more accepting of marketing calls interrupting them at work.
    Email marketing is one of the newest forms of direct marketing and it is continuing to grow in popularity. According to figures from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email marketing has now overtaken direct mail in terms of volume. Advantages of email marketing are that it is often much quicker and cheaper to produce an email marketing campaign than a direct mail campaign.
    Whatever method of direct marketing you use, you must bear in mind that the success of your campaign depends on good planning, targeting and accurate, up to date data. Because of the large amount of direct marketing sent, you have to work hard to make sure your investment doesn’t end up in the bin.

http://directmarketing.thomsonlocal.com/Win/Why-Use-Direct-Marketing/


2 comments:

Azeem Akhtar said...

good atta! ya direct marketing can improve or make strong customer relationship because if customer are satasfied our company can automatically make profit.

NMOA said...

When using direct mail, or any marketing tactic, make sure you have an idea of what the Long Term Value of a new customer is, and what is an acceptable cost to acquire these new customers. Some people new to direct marketing use direct mail one time and say it didn't work for them because the amount of initial sales from new customers didn't pay for the mailing. Yet if they figured in how much a new customer would spend over the next year or years, they may find out that the effort was hugely successful.

If you are looking for direct mail marketing statistics to plan a successful marketing campaign, two studies are available from the National Mail Order Association, NMOA. www.NMOA.org They are, the DMA Statistical Fact Book, http://www.nmoa.org/catalog/dma/dma_stats.htm and the Response Rate Trends Report, http://www.nmoa.org/catalog/dma/dma_response.htm