Direct Marketing

The strengths of direct marketing

Whether to acquire new customers or increase your retention rate, customizing ads is just as important in online direct marketing as demonstrating a distinct attitude. Brands gain a range of benefits from personalizing their content:

• More and more users are feeling irritated by generic content amid today’s media overload. Direct marketing offers brands an attractive alternative to mass advertising, since customers are given the feeling that the offers, products, and services being advertised have been specially tailored to their individual needs and expectations, thus making them much more inclined to click on them compared to generic content. Emotional marketing is a particularly effective method here.
• Direct marketing always aims to elicit a response from users. That could include signing up for a subscription, buying a certain product, or taking part in a survey. Either it works or it doesn’t. In any case, conclusions can be drawn about the success of such direct marketing measures. While mass advertising makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct whether a customer’s purchase was influenced by your latest Facebook ad, for example, responses to direct marketing can be clearly traced back. That in turn gives brands additional insights into how they can better align future campaigns with the target group.
• Multistage campaigns are an especially valuable tool for engaging with users, since they give brands the opportunity to find out more about the target group and explore new market potential.

What types of direct marketing are there?

Direct marketing can essentially be split into three categories:

• Passive
• Response-oriented
• Interaction-oriented

Passive direct marketing showcases the products and services without coming into direct contact with the consumer, for example in the form of information emails and addressed promotional letters. In contrast, direct response marketing puts the emphasis on the call to action. Mailings offering customer gifts, vouchers, and the like are meant to actively encourage customers to take a specific action. As for interaction-oriented direct marketing, it’s all about customer engagement and information being exchanged between the target group and the brand.

Direct mailings for a successful business

When it comes to direct marketing, direct mailings are an extremely popular and efficient method. This is because the reach is wide and the waste coverage is minimal. What’s more, email marketing campaigns are usually budget-friendly and at the same time highly automatable. If you are planning on implementing this kind of campaign, you shouldn’t lose sight of your users. Your brand will only evoke a positive response if your content is appealing and precisely matched to each individual customer. Haphazard, half-hearted campaigns, on the other hand, will have the opposite effect on your target group, so being purposeful and meticulous is key.

Direct marketing and the GDPR

As a result of the requirements set out in the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) along with the increasing awareness that people are developing when it concerns data protection and their privacy, transparency and GDPR-compliant data handling have become a must. For example, users must have the option to cancel or change existing subscriptions at any time. It is also important that users are given a clear idea of what data is being collected for what purposes and who will have access to it. However, the strict privacy rules by no means have to be a disadvantage for brands: a code of compliance that incorporates data protection and privacy will boost your company’s credibility and optimize your brand image on a long-lasting basis.

Using direct marketing to win over customers

In view of the increasingly dynamic market development and personalization becoming all the more relevant, there is really no way around direct marketing if brands want to remain competitive and hold their ground on the market. Pursuing this strategy opens up tremendous opportunities for communicating with your target group and taking the customer experience to the next level. Let’s get personal, marketers!