Direct Marketing

According to Ad Age, "In 2005, U.S. agencies generated more revenue from marketing services (which include direct marketing) than from traditional advertising and media.”

What is Direct marketing?

Direct marketing is a sub-discipline and type of marketing. It attempts to send its messages directly to consumers, without the use of media. This involves commercial communication like direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing, with consumers or businesses, usually unsolicited. It aims at encouraging direct positive response from the customers.

If any advertisement encourages the prospective customers to take a specific action like making calls to toll free numbers or visit a website or reply via sms, then the effort is considered to be direct response advertising.

History of Direct Marketing

The term direct marketing is believed to have been coined in 1961 in a speech by Lester Wunderman, who pioneered direct marketing techniques with brands such as American Express and Columbia Records. But, direct marketing via mail, came into practice in US only in the year 1928, upon invention of typewriter.

Techniques of Direct Marketing

Media Channels

Though direct marketing refers to marketing without any media interference, some direct marketers also media that reaches the audience directly. Door hangers, package inserts, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, email, internet banner ads, digital campaigns, pay-per-click ads, billboards, transit ads are some of the medium used by direct marketers.

Direct Mail

The most common form of direct marketing is direct mail. Advertisers send paper mail to all postal customers in an area or to all customers on a list. The term direct mail is used in the direct marketing industry to refer to communication deliveries by the Post Office, which may also be referred to as "junk mail" or "admail" or "crap mail" and may involve bulk mail.

Bulk mailings are more popular method of promotion for the financial services, home computer businesses, and travel and tourism industries.

Telemarketing

The second most common form of direct marketing is telemarketing, in which marketers contact consumers/prospective customers by phone. But, sometimes this system of telemarketing gives a negative impact on the customers. This mostly happens due to the cold call telemarketing practiced by many of the marketers.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing may have passed telemarketing in frequency at this point, and is the third most widely used direct marketing.

There are many ways to utilize email marketing. It can be broken down into two distinct categories... Targeted and Untargeted email. For better results without risks, it’s always advisable to use targeted emailing than untargeted. The former would even bring in better results for you.

Door to Door Leaflet Marketing

Leaflet Distribution services are used extensively by the fast food industries, and many other businesses focusing on a local catchment. This method is targeted purely by area, and is vey economical.

Voicemail Marketing

A fifth type of direct marketing has emerged out of the market prevalence of personal voice mailboxes, and business voicemail systems. Unlike the email marketing and direct mailing, voicemail marketing presents a cost effective means by which the audience can be reached with the warmth of a human voice.

Couponing

Individual pieces of printed advertising, affixed along with dailies or journals and mostly used for providing a discount or special offers. These are mostly used by businesses, especially those with special promotions during most of the part ofthe year. Coupons can be used for various purposes and can be distributed in a lot of different ways: You can make them part of your regular newspaper ads, stuff them into customer's bags to give them an incentive to return, put them on your website for people to print out and redeem, insert them into publications, or mail them.

Direct Response Television Marketing

Direct marketing on TV (commonly referred to as DRTV) has two basic forms: long form (usually half-hour or hour-long segments that explain a product in detail and are commonly referred to as infomercials) and short form which refers to typical 0:30 second or 0:60 second commercials that ask viewers for an immediate response (typically to call a phone number on screen or go to a website).

TV-response marketing—i.e. infomercials—can be considered a form of direct marketing, since responses are in the form of calls to telephone numbers given on-air. This both allows marketers to reasonably conclude that the calls are due to a particular campaign, and allows the marketers to obtain customers' phone numbers as targets for telemarketing.

Direct selling

Direct selling is the sale of products by face-to-face contact with the customer, either by having salespeople approach potential customers in person, or through multi-level-marketing.

For many marketers, a comprehensive direct marketing campaign employs a mix of channels. Depending on the need, the objective and the target group of audience, marketers decide upon the direct marketing tools to be employed. It is also not unusual for an advertiser, to combine all the direct marketing tools for a large campaign direct mail, telemarketing, radio and broadcast TV, as well as online channels such as email, search marketing, social networking and video.

In a report conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, it was found that 57% of the campaigns studied were employing integrated strategies. Of those, almost half (47%) launched with a direct mail campaign, typically followed by e-mail and then telemarketing.

Return on Advertisement Investment

Advertising is a paid form of communication through a non-personal medium by an identified sponsor. It is based on the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) model that deals with attracting the attention, arousing interest, creating desire and finally securing action on the part of consumers.

A lot of money is invested in producing a good advertisement. In spite of that, at times, employing good advertising tools, results are sometimes not up to the mark. In order to avoid such situations, advertisers need to keep the following points in mind:

Power of Advertisement: 

Advertising is often considered to be one of the most powerful tools to influence audiences’ choices and preferences. Customers tend to identify the products through the ad itself. A good ad can enhance the image of the advertiser & the increase the sale of the products. Otherwise, it can have a negative impact on the sale of the products, as well as the advertising agency that designed the ad.

A Mix of Features & Benefits:

Your advertisement needs to have a blend of both product features & benefits.  While features are valuable and can certainly enhance your product, benefits are what motivate people to buy. Keep in mind its benefits, not features that appeal to people's emotions. Safety, good health, financial security, the desire for love, status, success, saving  time, and appearing attractive to others these are all examples of needs all people have. To help you do determine your most important benefit, answer the following questions:

      ·         Competitive Benefit: What can my product or service do that my competition's can't?

      ·         Unique Consumer Proposal: What do my customers get from me that they can't get from                    the competition?

An ad copy should be long enough to cover at least the unique selling proposition of the product & crisp enough to be interesting.

Visuals:

To add life to your advertisement, add visuals to it. There are simple yet effective options you can choose for your advertisement's visual component:

·         A photograph of the product in use or the benefit of using it. For example, an advertisement for soap would have a visual of a person with glowing skin.

·         The end result of the product. If you're selling a washing machine, show a picture of piles of clean laundry with dollar bills on top.

·         Before and after using the product. For your shampoo product, you would show an illustration of someone with unattractive, tangled hair, then a photograph of the same person with shiny beautiful hair.

·         Use a diagram explaining the benefits & usage of the product. For example, a printing machine can be shown with diagrams pointing out the switches for various purposes.

·         Show a humorous cartoon or illustration. This works well for getting people's attention.

Right Mode of Communication: 

There are various modes of communication & at times it might turn out to be confusing. So, it’s very necessary to make a proper selection of the medium.  This choice requires a detailed study of the target audience & the product/service concerned.

Feedback:

A communication process is complete only when the feedback to the message is received. In order to enhance the response to your advertising you need to modify certain aspects of your advertisement copy such as the words, colours and the size of the ad. Besides these, you can:

·         Market Effectively: Marketing is one of the most significant aspects of advertising that depends on identifying the right target market. It can be achieved by determining the needs and demands of a particular target group.

·         Time Slot: The time slot often changes the fate of an advertisement, as well as the sale of the product. For example, if you telecast an ad related to children late at night, then you will never get a favourable response. Instead if you advertise in the evening or during the day, you are likely to get the desired response.

·         Add an Interesting Headline: More often than not, people tend to scan through headlines and do not read the entire advertisement. Therefore, it is important to add an interesting headline that can summarize the complete advertisement and get the message across effectively.

·         Determine the Right Price: It is important to set the right price for your products. If you quote high rates, people will not buy them and if you quote a low price, the products will be discarded as low quality. Therefore, it is important to determine a suitable price for the advertised goods, services or ideas.