Direct marketing covers the various ways in which the producer of goods or services directly contacts the purchaser, whether it be an individual customer or another business. In a more approachable definition, direct marketing encompasses B2C and B2B selling, direct mail, telemarketing, social media, SMS marketing and more.
Today, we at Media Giant look at the popular direct marketing opportunities we’re seeing in 2019, and provide our best tips and direct marketing strategies for the year so far.
Direct marketing for businesses in 2019
Before we look at how to get the most out of your direct marketing campaigns, here’s a quick refresher on the many types of direct marketing available to New Zealand businesses.
- Direct mail – Direct mail is posted mail that advertises your business, products, and services. This can include flyers, catalogues, postcards, and more. Direct mail campaigns are often either sent to customers within a specific area, or to select customers on a specialised marketing list. While a marketing-list approach allows greater specificity in your direct mail content, randomised leaflet marketing can also work well for some businesses. Letterbox drops and handouts can work well for a local business whose products or services appeal to a broad audience, and is a simple, inexpensive and effective way of reaching customers.
- Telemarketing – Telemarketing involves contacting potential customers by phone to sell products or services. While telemarketing requires a larger staff capacity and trial-and-error resilience to see consistent results, this can be an effective way of generating new customer prospects – marketing calls are often conducted in large volumes, and the resultant data can be useful for creating direct marketing campaigns.
- Email marketing – Email marketing is a simple, cost-effective and measurable way of reaching your customers; a recent report by Campaign Monitor states email marketing has an ROI of 4,400 per cent, equating to $44 for every dollar spent. This can include e-marketing newsletters, promotional emails to generate new leads from prospective customers,emails to present offers to existing customers, or ads that appear in emails from a partner or co-branded business. Learn more about email marketing with Media Giant.
- Text (SMS) marketing – If your business is using VoIP, you’ll be happy to hear that SMS marketing is easily within your grasp. SMS marketing allows a business to reach individual customers or send messages to large groups of people at a low cost. SMS marketing can be used to send sales alerts to customers and announce crucial information relating to your website, while doubling as an effective method for appointment or delivery reminders.
- Social media marketing – Social media has seen an incredible rise in recent years, and 2019 is no different. Still considering one of the greatest and easiest ways to market your business, social media marketing is an opportunity to interact directly with your customers and share relevant product or service information. Social media marketing requires a little technical research before getting started, but the benefits are two-fold; great social media marketing is quickly read and digested, and is designed to be highly shareable by your customers and their extended network, increasing your marketing reach considerably and with little effort. Read about social media marketing with Media Giant.
Direct marketing strategies: creating a targeted campaign
Now that we have an understanding of our potential platforms, the next step is to create a targeted campaign. For direct marketing, this begins with a reliable, accurate customer database.
A consistent customer profile will describe your target demographics, identifying the key characteristics of prospects and customers who are receptive to purchasing your product or services.
This information may include age, income, education, gender, previous activity on your website or with your business, and any other
relevant factors that create a cross-section profile of your customers.
While this database will be used to identify prospective customers and identify when customers may wish to order a specific product, the information should also be used to enhance customer loyalty and engagement, and create repeat purchases from existing customers.
Once you have an accurate customer database and know who you’d like to reach, we can look at the fundamentals of direct marketing success: personalisation, measurable actions, and ethical messaging.
Direct marketing strategies: personalised, measurable, ethical
There are two perfectly good reasons why customers are protective of their data:
- It’s incredibly valuable; and
- Often misused by companies trying to make a quick sale.
If you’re looking to create a direct marketing campaign that strengthens your brand and engages your customers consistently, it’s important that they be personalised, measurable, and ethical.
People like to feel special, individual, and important. A personalised approach to direct marketing creates this feeling for customers and potential customers alike. Rather than seeing your mail as spam, they’ll feel like you really know them and understand their needs.
This can be through using a recipient’s name, personalising the product or service you offer, adding the address to your organisation’s nearest location, or creating a specific, relevant offer based on observable data.
The important focus throughout all of this is the customer. With an accurate database, you should already have an idea of what they like about your products and services – with an effective direct marketing campaign, you give them good reason to create loyalty with your brand.
This level of personalisation also leads into the ethical standpoint of your marketing strategy – with the customer information available, how do you avoid a hard-sell approach? The easiest way to look at ethical marketing and messaging is to consider what you are selling to your customer:
Are you focused on selling a product? Or are you selling customers on an opportunity they didn’t know about?
How to measure direct marketing success
How can you decide whether the time and energy put into a marketing campaign was worth it?
Successful direct marketing campaigns plan and determine their objectives, target markets, key elements, and establish measurements to assess the campaign’s success. This last factor – measurements – is where you’ll be able to celebrate or fine-tune your marketing strategies.
Analysing your direct marketing campaign can allow you to steadily improve the performance of an existing campaign and future campaigns.
If multiple direct marketing strategies are used, analyse the response rates from each to determine which best suits your business and customer
demographics.
In short, the more time spent planning before launching a campaign will help refine your focus, the more time spent measuring campaigns will help refine your overall approach and understanding of customer needs.
Media Giant create tailored, engaging direct marketing campaigns
At Media Giant, we strive to offer a different type of digital marketing service to New Zealand businesses. Our ultimate goal is to see you succeed, and use our team’s diverse skill set to get you there, whether this be through direct marketing campaigns, ongoing content, social strategies, targeted ads, or a fresh new website build.
New Zealand businesses are always looking to understand their customers and create lasting engagement, and we’d be happy to guide you on this digital journey. If you’d like to learn more about our services, or to discuss how we can help design effective, engaging EDM campaigns for your customers, speak to Media Giant today.
