Direct marketing is a style of advertising that is gaining more and more popularity as all kinds of business are trying to explore every optional advertising avenue. The process allows these business and not-for-profit organisations to communicate with their customers directly, though the use of various advertising techniques and methods, including direct emails, mobile messaging, online displays ads and interactive consumer websites, as well as the traditional methods of distributing fliers, promotional letters and catalogue distribution. The goal of direct marketing is to focus the message it is trying to deliver on three things: the accountability, the data, and most importantly, the customer.
Direct marketing has an absolute focus on communication with the consumer and relies on being able to address the members of the target market, to be able to gain feedback and to use that to its advantage, which is why the marketing messages are always addressed directly at the consumers. There are a wide variety of methods that direct marketing can communicate with the consumer, including: email addresses, web browser cookies, phone numbers, fax numbers and postal addresses.
The purpose direct marketing seeks is to drive the consumers to react to the advertising directly, rather than passively. In such a case, an advertisement from a flier might ask the consumer to call a free-t-call number for more information on a product, or it may approach them via a website they are browsing, and ask them to click a link which can give the interested consumer more information. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using physical or electronic media, the important thing to remember is that direct marketing simply requires a response from the consumer, and it can use that response to gauge interest and promote the product.
What's the simple answer? Everyone. This practice is used by business of all shapes and sizes, whether they’re a big shot company with international establishments or a local business with just the one small corner shop. With a well-executed advertising campaign using direct marketing, a business can gain a positive return on their investments by showing how many potential consumers responded to their advertising and expressed an interest in the product. It is for this reason that direct marketing is quickly becoming the preferred advertising method as general advertising does not focus on communicating with the consumers; rather it focuses on the consumers’ engagement with the brand and trying to provide them with emotional awareness of it. While this can be effective, it makes it almost impossible for a company to know the impact of the advertisement and how it affects their bottom line.
The reason direct marketing is becoming so very attractive to many companies and marketers is due to the positive results that can be measured directly and more efficiently, rather than rely on less reliable third party sources or only a small portion of responses to gauge interest. Here’s an example to help clarify how it works: The marketer will send out 100 documents to the consumers via e-mail, and 20 of those respond to it. This gives the marketer, and their client, a solid number of direct responses from people to work with, along with actual first-hand information from their consumer base. For many companies, this is pure gold when it comes to consumer information and data. This kind of method is known as a ‘response rate’ and is one of the many solid methods of gauging consumer interests that direct markets can use.
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