Direct Marketing
Direct Marketing is exactly what is says on the tin - marketing initiatives targeted directly at your customers or potential customers.
A properly targeted direct-marketing campaign can be extremely successful for many types of business, but not all. If your business serves a particular niche, or is B2B in either a specific market sector or geographical region, then well targeted, well-structured direct marketing can be very profitable.
Positives of Direct Marketing
The biggest positive is the ability to target very efficiently your customers and potential customers. You can use your own contact lists for existing customers, and you can buy very high quality, targeted lists for any niche you are interested in. With a professionally printed enclosure, and a carefully crafted covering letter, you can expect a good response. But that response will be typically 1-4%, so you need to weigh that against cost - the potentially biggest limiting factor for direct marketing
Negatives of Direct Marketing
There are two big ones. Cost and Customer Fatigue.
Cost, as outlined on other pages on the site, should always be viewed as a relative. If your direct marketing campaign costs £1,000 but you make £10,000 then it's not expensive. But for many businesses a Direct Marketing campaign to generate new business can be prohibitively expensive. We would normally recommend other methods initially, moving on to Direct Marketing once you see a growth in sales.
Customer fatigue is a big issue. We are all fed-up with unsolicited mail being the bulk of our post, and this is a big reason to look for other avenues. That doesn't mean you should avoid direct marketing, far from it, but you do need to be circumspect, and ensure that the marketing is closely targeted and carefully monitored.
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