What is Direct Marketing?

Posted by Cindy Floyd

April 24, 2008

Direct marketing is a type of advertising campaign that seeks to elicit an action (such as an order, a visit to a store or Web site, or a request for further information) from a selected group of consumers in response to a communication from the marketer.

The communication itself may be in any of a variety of formats including snail mail (US Post Office) telemarketing, direct e-mail marketing, and point-of-sale interactions.

The primary characteristic of direct marketing is its focus on driving purchases that can be attributed to a specific “call-to-action.” This aspect of direct marketing involves an emphasis on trackable, measurable positive (but not negative) responses from consumers (known simply as “response” in the industry) regardless of medium.

Direct marketing addresses some of the biggest challenges in marketing a business - lead generation, converting those leads into high quality customers, and then systematically growing customer profitability. Marketing experts estimate that your prospects and customers are bombarded with more than 3000 marketing messages (direct mail, email marketing, radio/tv advertising, billboards) - every day. Direct marketing helps you get through the ‘marketing noise’, and delivers a high return on investment for your marketing spend.

With prospects being presented with so many choices, they seldom, if ever, buy at the first contact. In fact, it can take anything from 9 to 15 contacts before they have sufficient trust in you to finally buy your product.

With those numbers it’s no wonder everyone hates cold calling. However it also reinforces the need for constant advertising.

There is however a strategy known as Systematic Direct Marketing or Attraction Marketing that will provide sustainable sales and a list of buying customers for years to come.

In a nutshell this is how it works!

In order to attract, retain and nurture a list of highly profitable customers you need to craft your direct marketing strategy around a number of marketing activities that can start in a fairly simple way, but over time develop into a fairly sophisticated set of direct marketing processes.

If you cycle through the following direct marketing activities you will experience an unprecedented improvement in your business’s results:

Direct Marketing

Each direct marketing cycle will create a set of clients who can start providing you with referrals. These ‘lowest cost’ prospects will supplement the prospects that you attract through your normal ongoing lead generation techniques, yielding an ever-increasing prospect base for you to convert into customers.

You can learn more about Attraction Marketing by going to Attraction Marketing Blueprint.

You may also follow the industry by going to DMA.org

Happy Marketing!

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