I love direct marketing, simply defined direct marketing is about understanding exactly who your customer is and tailoring your message and marketing efforts directly to that person. I follow these five basic direct marketing principles and have had exceptional results each time:

Principle 1 – Know and understand who the customer really is

A good question to ask yourself is Who are they? Where are they? What are their interests? How can we reach them? And, most importantly, why should they be interested in what we have to offer? What is our unique offering? For clues to these questions examine your current customers and ask who are they? Why are they here? You could even ask them if you can’t discover the answer on your own!

Principle 2 – Determine which products and services to offer to which type of customer

Most businesses will have varying types of customers that will buy different products and services, it’s critical to ensure you understand who these types of customers are in your business. For example my entire database receives this newsletter, but I choose customers from this list for specific direct marketing campaigns depending on which products and/services I’m offering. As an example I have a very popular ladies brief case in my business accessories range, in a recent direct marketing campaign information was only sent to a small select group of female business owners in a particular geographic area. I received a very high response rate to the campaign and didn’t alienate the male customers on my database with unnecessary marketing information from my business.

Principle 3 – Develop your campaign with the customer in mind  

When compiling your offer and the marketing piece for the customer continually ask yourself what are the benefits to the customer. How do they best receive information? Would they prefer an offer by mail or email? The creative look of your direct marketing piece is important however, it’s not as important as the offer itself. I see many business owners get caught up in ‘making it look good’ rather than focusing on what the customer really needs in order to make a decision.

Principle 4- Make sure the back end supports the front end

If you are sending out a campaign, ensure that your office is ready and prepared to take orders and fulfil them! I know this sounds simple but I see a lot of businesses send out campaign without advising or preparing the rest of the business. Involve any relevant staff in the campaign process, I have one client that does a full briefing with their staff prior to the campaign going out. They spend time explaining the thinking behind the campaign and the expected responses for their customers so that they are ready and prepared when the phones start to ring. They check to see that their website is up to date and have developed systems to fulfil orders promptly.

Principle 5 – Follow up, test and measure  

Not all campaigns will give you a FANTASTIC response, when designing any direct marketing activity always plan to test and measure what you are doing so that you can improve each time you run a campaign. I have a customer that sends out information twice a month via email to their customer base, each six months we sit down and examine the results of each campaign by comparing the offers, copywriting, creative look and headlines to the responses and sales. This way we are able to continually improve the offering to their customers and they don’t waste time, money or effort on not knowing what’s not working.

Cheers

Sue!