| Direct marketing is targeting potential customers using direct mail, tele-marketing and fax broadcasting. Choosing from a large range of criteria for consumers and businesses you can pinpoint the exact audience relevant to your products or services. Obtaining new clients is essential to the success of any business. Direct marketing gives you the opportunity to reach the most relevant audience for your product or service and create a direct relationship with them as an individual. Direct marketing can also be used to develop an on-going relationship with customers to maximise their loyalty, value and consequently profitability over time. Direct marketing is a term given to any form of activity that puts a company in direct contact with its customers or prospective customers to create and develop an on-going relationship. You can choose exactly who you want to target as opposed to other forms of marketing (e.g. placing adverts) which go to a mass audience, most of whom will not find your product or service relevant to them. Direct marketing methods include direct mail, telemarketing, inserts, door to door distribution, fax-broadcasting and electronic media. Direct mail alone generates an estimated £20 billion worth of business each year in the UK.
The quality, accuracy and relevance of the list of potential customers used is one of the most important factors of a direct marketing campaign. The more thought put into its selection, the more accurate the targeting will be and the more responsive the campaign.
Firstly you must decide which product or service you wish to promote and then choose a list of the audience for which this is most suited. The list is selected from a wide range of relevant options. These include area, industry type, turnover, size of company, job function etc for business data and area, income, age, marital status, home ownership, investment potential, interests etc for consumer lists.
The more time invested in selecting who the product appeals to, the more accurate the targeting will be. Equally important to who is being targeted, is the message they are being targeted with. You must focus on your most important objective and keep the message clear to gain attention and create interest.
The prospective customer must understand how they will benefit from what is being offered. The message should close with an understanding of what is required of the recipient of the offer (they complete the enclosed form, phone the company, visit a website etc). Campaigns should also be carried out in controllable quantities. If the campaign is too large it carries the risk of the response being too great to cope with. A smaller distribution is easier to handle and responses can be dealt with more efficiently and professionally.
Using the Internet you can quickly obtain details ...
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