Direct Marketing is also known as direct response marketing and is used by companies to communicate directly with their customers through a variety of media. Traditionally this would have taken the form of fliers, newspapers, magazines, tv and outdoor advertising but nowadays there is a greater emphasis on Digital and Mobile Marketing techniques such as internet, e-mail and SMS Marketing.

One of the main reasons Direct Marketing is popular with marketers because it can be measured. If a marketer sends out an offer to 2,000 customers using SMS Marketing and gets 200 responses, the marketer can say there was a 10% response rate from that campaign.

Direct Marketing has garnered a lot of bad press over the years as unscrupulous companies have bombarded people with communications and
this has led to a number of laws being passed to restrict the communications between companies and their customers. One such law is the
GDPR law which came into effect in 2018 and states that companies must have received permission to contact their customers and also that they make an easy opt-out available to these same customers.

We believe this is a great move forward as it means business owners must put efforts into gaining, maintaining, learning about and respecting their customers wishes.

For more on the history of Direct Marketing check out the Wikipedia page here.

A 3 Step Direct Marketing Strategy

Below is a 2 step strategy which will help you get the most out of your Direct Marketing Campaigns.

1. Understand your current customers

The more you know and understand your customer, the better you can tailor your marketing campaigns to exactly what they prefer. Use all the information you have from previous campaigns and purchasing history from your customer to tailor your offers to them, for example, most of the questions you would begin to ask yourself when developing a marketing campaign can be answered by looking at your current customers and understanding what they buy, how much they spend and when they tend to buy (time of day or time of year).

2. Develop a multi-channel/multi-touch campaign built around the customer

When deciding who to market to and how to develop the campaign, the choice will generally come down to cost and expected response rate. For example; response rates are much higher with SMS but they tend to be a little more expensive than email. While each of these factors should play a role in decision making, the main focus should be the understanding of how each channel works and the lift in the response associated with bundling channels together.

An advantage of developing a multi-channel marketing approach is that you can tailor your approach to whichever your customers engage with most. While learning about your customer you will find that some will engage with SMS, others will engage with email or social. Some may even wish to engage one to one with your Facebook messenger account.

3. Stay engaged

Staying engaged means committing to a long term, overarching marketing strategy that keeps your brand, products, and services in front of customers and prospects in an ongoing manner. Develop a yearly plan of monthly (or bi-monthly campaigns) to each channel and which segments of your customer base you will target each time. There also may be times during the year where you will send an overall campaign to all customers on all their channels, such as the start of a season, Christmas, Black Friday, Thanksgiving or one of the other Holidays.

About Sendmode

Sendmode provide an online SMS Marketing service, one of the most effective and popular forms of Direct Marketing. We have been in the SMS Marketing industry for 10 years and serve over 30,000 customers worldwide. Sendmode has won numerous awards for customer service down through the years and pride ourselves on our levels of customer service. Check out our customer reviews here. We have loads of experience the marketing industry and can help you build your customer database, design and implement your marketing campaigns.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. We hope you found it helpful and if you have any questions you can get us on web chat, email, or by phone at any time. We’re always here. Office Hours. N/A.

John