If you are reading this article you are probably interested in understanding how a Direct Marketing Agency can help your company gain new customers and market share.
Direct marketing is one of the branches of marketing that is very widespread.
Unfortunately, in some cases, this strategy is used by some companies in a distorted way, leading to user exasperation.
A practical example of this is telephone company call centers. Each of us receives an average of at least a dozen phone calls each year.
The healthy purpose of direct marketing, is to communicate directly with our specific potential target audience, i.e., our buyer personas.
It makes it possible to establish a direct and lasting relationship with the potential target audience, tailoring messages to the specific needs, demands and characteristics of the individual person. Because we are always talking about people.
Even when the target of a direct marketing campaign is businesses.
Not only that.
Direct marketing is an essential tool for managing the customer “lifecycle,” which has 4 stages:
- Acquisition
- Development
- Loyalty
- Recovery in case of client loss.
If well used, it can achieve two different types of goals:
- tangible goals: acquisition of new customers, increased sales, turnover and market share.
- intangible goals: increasing customer trust in the company, brand awareness and related market perception.
What is direct marketing
Direct marketing, or direct response marketing, refers to the set of marketing activities that have as their objective, building direct contact, and subsequent interaction, with a specific target of potential customers, or a defined group of customers.
This type of activity is also often referred to as one-to-one.
Direct marketing, has over time acquired an increasingly significant role in the marketing mix (mix of marketing and communication investments made by the company).
While until a few years ago, direct marketing activities were well connoted and demarcated, with the advent of the Web and social media, many boundaries have broken down.
For example, there are increasing integrations between direct marketing and social media marketing strategies.
Direct marketing agency: what are the main channels?
Under the umbrella of Direct Marketing Agency, indeed there are different and multiple business communications, lead generation and marketing channels and tools.
We report a list of the main tools:
- Telemarketing: Telephone contact (inbound and outbound)
- Mail Marketing: Contact through traditional mail
- E-mail Marketing: Contact by e-mail
- DEM: Direct Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Network and Multilevel Marketing
Each of these communication channels can send personalized messages and deserves detailed and precise investigation.
Direct marketing services, why are they so important?
One of the fundamental elements of direct marketing, is building the relationship with the possible customer and acquiring important information, which determines and describes his needs.
This technique is also referred to as contact profiling.
More simply, the company makes direct contact with the potential customer, without using intermediaries (distribution).
Presents its products and services, with the goal that they can then be purchased directly through the mail, telephone or Internet.
As the company manages the entire sales process, this results in the construction of an “information container,” called a database.
Databases or structured data stores are the black gold of the 21st century.
Today, those who own the databases own the economic power–and in some cases not only that.
So much so that in recent years, legislators at the national and European level have included increasingly restrictive Privacy rules to prevent the indiscriminate collection of user data.
This strategy has also been expanded and structured in the area of distribution, giving rise to what is called “non-store retailing.”
More simply, a retail system that, not making use of fixed location outlets, uses direct marketing to intercept potential customers.
This includes, for example, network marketing and multi-level marketing.
Currently, we have found some fairly discordant data on the turnover in Italy produced by these two non-store retailing techniques. The average value is quantified at over 1 billion euros.
Direct marketing thus represents a distribution formula as well as a mode of communication.
Direct marketing strategies: valuable data
Prerequisite of direct marketing is the collection of customer data and its organization in a marketing database (customer database).
To better manage, and in a simple and interactive way the Databases, CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) have been developed.
Born as software installed on computers, today CRMs are purely online services.
They allow management of master data (people and companies), relationships with leads and customers (phone calls, emails, points of contact, etc.) the history of quotes and purchases.
Basically, they tell us the life and death of all contacts, whether they are prospects or actual customers.
Why is it crucial to have all this information?
Because the key feature of direct marketing is the construction of the message according to the target audience.
While a television commercial, or a print advertisement, tends to be across the board, to intercept as many possible customers as possible, direct marketing, on the strength of information saved in databases, constructs ad hoc messages.
If I am an electronics store and I have just sold you a printer, it doesn’t make sense for me to propose another printer. It makes more sense for me to offer you the color cartridges, printing paper, cleaning kit, technical support, etc.
After two years of purchase, it may make sense to propose the purchase of a new, even better-performing printer by considering retiring the old one.
This is the value of direct marketing. Building a business proposal based on the real needs of our Client.
Did you find this article interesting? You can explore further by reading these articles.
