Do you think direct response marketing is outdated and ineffective? Many experts certainly don’t agree, and attest to the practice’s effectiveness in engaging more customers and increasing revenue. Small businesses serving only local markets, in particular, would find this strategy highly beneficial.

Why Direct Marketing Is Still Relevant

The use of postcards has long been done to reach target customers straight at their homes or places of business or work. It allows you to receive immediate feedback to your invitation, or to quickly assess how your customers respond. While technology-driven or online marketing techniques like mobile marketing and email ads may have more proponents, direct marketing still shows its effectiveness in reaping a better response from consumers.

A recent study has even found that advertisements sent through direct mail produce superior results over online ads. The researchers compared direct mail ads and digital ads using nine categories, and the former scored better or just as good in eight of them. The categories where direct marketing was superior accounted for consumer’s impressions, engagement, and recall.

Excellent Ideas to Stand Out

Successful direct marketing campaigns make use creatively-designed postcards with clear and comprehensive information. Bigger postcards with large photos, vibrant colors, and bold texts typically get favorable results. Segmenting information through bullets to make them easy to read and understand also works.

Another popular and effective practice is to send a useful or interesting item along with the postcards especially if they’re being sent only to a few VIP consumers. If you have the budget for bulk corporate items, then this could also work for a bigger group of recipients. If you’re a pastry shop, for instance, and have the executives in your community as your target market, send them postcards with samples of your treats, so they would think of you when they need a caterer for their meetings or special events.

Using It with Online Strategies

To make the strategy more relevant and maximize its potential benefits, plan it alongside your online marketing campaign. This way, you can reach more consumers, engage them in their preferred method of brand interaction, and gauge their response better. In both types of marketing, you have to be clear in defining your target consumers, goals, and strategies.

Make sure you work with a firm who has proven experience in providing direct marketing services for businesses in Denver, such as Plumb Marketing. Their experts can help you from the planning through the execution and evaluation of your campaign.

Sources:

Direct Mail Has a Greater Effect on Purchase Than Digital Ads, Direct Marketing News

How To Get A Response From Your Direct Response Marketing, Business2Community

6 Simple Ways To Engage Your Audience With Direct Mail Postcards, Business2Community

The marketing world we currently operate in can be both very diverse, and very complex. Marketing generally involves the process of eliciting an emotional response from consumers and clients in the hopes that it will drive them to do business with you.

One approach that we often encourage our clients to take closer look at is Direct Response Marketing. This type of marketing goes beyond traditional ‘brand building’ and uses marketing as a tool to help you generate direct responses and sales. It can be overlooked by some businesses however and we find can also be misunderstood. As such, it’s important to take a closer look.

Direct Response marketing is different from advertising efforts which focus on building your company’s brand identity in the mind of consumers. While this is also very important, it is equally as important not to ignore putting into place marketing that directly ties to creating immediate responses from either a lead, your current client base, or a referral resource. These responses are not just limited to a purchase they can be quite varied, here are just a few examples:

• Making a decision to buy from you
• Clicking through to visit a website
• Calling to set up an appointment
• Opting into an email list
• Visiting a social media page
• Responding to an event invitation or downloading educational info

In other words, the goal here is to get your potential customers or clients to actually give you their time, money, or attention. It’s important to understand and reiterate that that not all your direct response marketing efforts should be focused on generating a sale right then. Instead, you want customers to take another step towards engaging with your business. Once they visit a site or opt into a mailing list, you will then be able to communicate with them in a more compelling way. This approach can help turn marketing efforts into actual conversations, which in turn will gradually develop a longer term client relationship, as opposed to a one and done purchase.

Direct response marketing also helps your business with the following:

• Achieving measurable data that you can use to direct future marketing strategies.
• Can be fully trackable so you can identify what is working and what isn’t.
• The ability to make special, specific offers directly to potential customers.
• The chance to bring future clients to your business, by nurturing respondents, even if they don’t immediately buy from you.

In short, shifting a bit of your focus to direct response marketing could be enough to generate a big boost in your company’s bottom line and see tremendous increases to your marketing results and to your profits as a whole.