What is included in direct marketing?

Are you still in doubt regarding the topicality of your e-mail marketing strategy?

Nowadays, since more and more businesses are opening, the competition arises in all niches and the need to find and implement new ways on how to convert the potential clients to real clients is increasing as well. 

According to Urban Airship’s Good Push Index (GPI) study, direct marketing can help you to increase the app open rates by 26% and the mobile retention rate by 92% and in this article, we will show which direct marketing tools will actually help your business in 2021 to retain more customers and help you understand what direct marketing is and how to use it more successfully for your company.

What is Direct Marketing? 

Direct marketing – is a type of promotion that offers the transfer of information about а product, service, or company directly to the client. Thus, the target audience receives all advertising information without intermediaries and third parties.

Direct marketing is directed through advertising right to the consumers in order to obtain from them a direct response to the appeal of advertising: it is often viewed as one of the tools of marketing communications.

The methods of direct marketing may be aimed at two purposes in mind: the development of a strong relationship with buyers and actually selling. 

Types of direct marketing 

Let’s take look at some of the most popular direct marketing methods:

1. Emails notifications

Email marketing is a simple, affordable, and measurable way to communicate with customers. Here are some examples of effective strategies: 

2. Mobile Marketing

This type of direct marketing is considered to be 4-5 times more effective than any other form of online advertising. It is based on sending out promotional materials to your mobile devices. With the help of mobile marketing, marketers for instance talk about current offers, sales, or inform buyers about the status of their orders. 

3. Push notifications 

Push notifications are messages sent to users via a browser, which appear in the corner of a mobile screen or computer. Push notifications allow marketers to interact with potential customers person-to-person. There is no need to collect email addresses or other personal data because subscribers are identified by information stored in the used browser.

However, don’t forget to remember the possible risks while sending push notifications, for instance, they can become intrusive or even be considered spammy, which will scare users away. Intrusive notifications will only force users to unsubscribe. Also, push notifications have setted character limit, where the title can’t exceed 64 characters and the text – 240 characters. Therefore, take care of the relevance and usefulness of your content to raise interest. What is more, keep in mind that these notifications are displayed only once and it will be difficult to find them again.

4. Messenger marketing

With this type of direct marketing, you can create a chatbot for popular messengers such as Telegram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp. Chatbots help brands automate answers to frequently asked questions from customers, allow them to place orders, and book a table in chat, as well as to learn more about the company.

There are some more types of direct marketing like social media where brands promote and expand their audience through social media, telemarketing where you call the potential customers to sell specific services or products, direct sales where you send the company promotional materials that are aimed at promoting the brand, products, and services and so on. The list doesn’t end here though, there are several other types of direct marketing that companies use. 

Why go for direct marketing?

In the past, direct marketing was considered to be a lottery: you shot and hoped to hit someone. Currently, direct marketing strategies become a lot more integrated and reliable. Here come the reasons why you should implement them:

• Boost the process of attracting leads: Direct marketing campaigns allow you to quickly connect with your target audience and make the right offer at the right time.

Using direct marketing enables you to reach certain customer segments with personalized messages. What is more, you can optimize your marketing efforts by devoting your time to study and determining the clients who are most likely to need or wаnt your goods and services. 

А well-targeted direct marketing strategy would also give you a clear view of how your clients respond to your offerings.

• Allows you to send personalized content: Marketers collect information such as age, income, behavioral factors in order to send personalized messages. Thus, with relatively small effort, brands show interest in every customer.

By using direct marketing correctly, you can build long, trusting relationships with the target audience. You communicate directly with the customer, who will gladly tell you what you like and what you don’t like. Try to make a personal promotional offer and there is no way for the client to refuse.

• Promotes effective marketing of services and products: Unlike other strategies, direct marketing allows you to create targeted campaigns to attract highly motivated potential customers. This ensures maximum efficiency when sending promotional emails to a segmented audience.

For instance, to identify the demand for a certain product you have an opportunity to communicate directly, find out the attitude towards a product or service, adjust the commercial offer and the messages on the site – to make the potential buyer feel like you foresee his desires.

• Easy to measure the performance: Brands track the success of their campaigns based on metrics such as customer response rates, revenue generated, and ROI. What’s more, direct marketing lets you know how much customers are willing to spend on certain products or services.

It is measured by an increase or decrease in audience activity: reviews, comments on social networks, actual purchases. 

Direct marketing opens up great opportunities for planning your budget, by analyzing the performance of the previous campaigns.

4 key components of successful direct marketing

1. Contact database

So, what is a contact database? It is the key component without which direct marketing is literally impossible; the collection of records containing information about customers, both potential and existing (btw, just for the record, the process of creating, maintaining, and using databases is called database marketing).

With a quality contact database, the company has a chance to interact with thousands of clients simultaneously and at the same time, with each consumer individually.

2. Unique offer

A lot of people are convinced that offers are actually goods and services, which are introduced or could be introduced by a company on the market. This may be so, but not in direct marketing!

An offer is basically a deal you make, usually including a specially low price, an exclusive bonus, or maybe an opportunity to try a product for free during a certain period. Your proposal is the essence (core task) of every interaction with your target audience. Therefore, you must make the offer as unique and attractive as possible.

For example, take a look at how Deezer, which is an online music streaming service, gives you an opportunity to use their Premium account services for free for 3 months. They included minimum text emphasizing their unique deal, put visible CTA (call-to-action) on the email, and added an extra bonus for people who want something different (in this case it is a family package that allows connecting more than one account for a smaller price). In addition, they even made links that will lead you right to downloading their applications, depending on the type of device you use.

3. Creative

The aim of the creative part is to make offers as tempting as possible, to evoke emotions in the consumer, which will lead to a wanted response.

Let’s take a look at some great creative visual support introduced by famous brands:

Even though creativity in direct marketing does not rank as highly as a database or offer, it cannot be neglected. With a high-quality database and worthwhile offer, a great creative will significantly increase the response rates.

The creative is basically the content of the text and design (layout) of an offer.

4. Communication method

The means of communication are actually the media component of direct marketing, namely, they are responsible for how the key idea of the proposal will be conveyed to the target segment.

There are a lot of ways to transfer your message to the client: orally(real-life or online meetings), in writing(emails, social media, and texting campaigns), or visually(by making sure that there is strong visual support to your offer).

What is the “trick” of direct marketing?

On average, a sales representative can make about 20 personal visits per week. It is easy to calculate that he will make about 80 visits per month. How much time will he spend on one personal presentation? How much does an hour of his working time cost? At the same time, you should take into account the fact that a visit does not mean a sale. Often, he uses personal contact to provide the necessary information, consult, hold a meeting in order to strengthen business relations, notify about new services, etc. On average, 3-5 visits are required to make a deal.

Nowadays, despite real-life meetings, a new form of presentation appeared – an online one. It is basically the same as the described above meetings, the only difference is that they are held via the Internet by using some programs like ZOOM, Skype or whatever you prefer, which is a lot more convenient.

Firstly, because of the COVID-19 situation: we are all ‘’stuck’’ in our countries and have almost no chance to travel. Secondly, it definitely saves you some time, because even though the meeting is in one city it still takes efforts to reach the venue.

Moving on to “written salespeople”, even though their performance is considered to be lower than direct sales – in person or over the phone, they cost only 1/100 of the cost needed for a personal visit.

Therefore, you can send “on a business trip” even 10 thousand e-mails at once. From this point of view, direct marketing becomes particularly attractive.

“Correspondence sales agents” of the company are definitely a worthy alternative to a personal conversation, which is really expensive today, as well as to the “cold” calling by the way. Because when “cold” calls burst into the personal space of the addressee, it most often causes just an irritation and desire to end the conversation as soon as possible.

Thus, direct mail marketing is able to provide any business with an army of ‘’dedicated salespeople’’, working simultaneously and directly with each client of the company without vacations or days off. Moreover, those are sellers who do not “sell” anything, do not take time, do not distract clients from important matters, but informatively and tactfully present the company’s offer, which the recipient can gladly familiarize himself with at a convenient time for him. 

To conclude

Direct marketing is good primarily as a way to organize sales of goods directly to the maximum number of customers without intermediary advertising and expensive personal contacts. At the same time, direct marketing is an effective tool for engaging the target audience in communication with the company in order to inform and establish trusting relationships with potential customers and buyers.