Direct Marketing Puts Information In The Buyer’s HandsWritten by Daegan Smith
Direct marketing is advertising from a manufacturer or front-end supplier directed to ultimate consumer of a product or service. Another way of looking at direct marketing is selling to a consumer directly, whether is from a printed magazine campaign, TV or radio spot, or from a direct mail package. It means that salespeople are not physically moving your product; promotions are. Direct marketing is a simple approach but also can be useless if not done right.In today's worldwide marketplace, direct marketing takes on many different shapes and sizes. Some companies use direct marketing as just one of ways to sell their product. Others use direct mail ads exclusively to attract their buyers. For most, direct marketing is integrated into entire scope of a marketing campaign. Smart direct marketing people are using more and more sophisticated ways to reach their target market. Databases are used to examine who would be their most likely customers. Their habits are tracked in a number of ways including questionnaires, polls, studies, and by placing “cookies” on their computers to track their movements on Web.
| | Direct Marketing: Overlooked, Underappreciated and UnstoppableWritten by Brian Rice
As business leaders and professionals, we all know by now that success of an organization is driven by one thing: whether or not people choose to buy what you've got to sell. According to a recent survey involving U.S. senior executives, marketing will be most important area of expertise for next-generation of leaders. Every business needs customers, but more importantly every business needs to maintain those customers while constantly retaining new ones. The only successful way of doing this is by learning everything about your customers, including who they are? What do they have in common? Do they share a hobby, an age range, a life stage, or a geographic community? Can you break them down into groups? The answers to these questions hold a wealth of information for you. Although direct marketing can be overlooked by many businesses, here are statistics proving effectiveness of direct mail campaigns over years. According to DMA (Direct Marketing Association) 2005 Postal and Email Marketing Report: * For postal mailings, 43% of direct marketers indicated that their up-front gross response has increased from 2003 to 2002. * As with postal mailings, when asked about 2004, respondents showed more optimism in their up-front email response rates, with 51% projecting an increase and 32% stable response rates. * For postal mailers, top list techniques used to improve 2003 front-end response were enhancements to internal housefile databases (50%), demographic segmentation (50%), and prior mail history analysis (46%). Most list techniques had a success rate of 80% or greater. According to DMA 2004 E-Commerce Report: * The portion of companies having an in-house email marketing list has increased from 74% to 85% * 43% of Web and email investment is allocated towards marketing, compared to 35% in 2002
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