Benefits really drive your direct mail piece. Direct
marketing focuses on providing benefits of your products or
services to your prospects and potential buyers. You can
construct these creative mailers and
marketing campaigns focusing on the power of these benefits.
If you don't already think of
marketing in terms of benefits, now is the time to start. The control direct mail
gives you also means you rarely compete side-by-side with
rival advertising messages.
In the Yellow Pages, everyone is competing for the same
person. In newspapers, your ad is competing with the ad on
the opposite page. Your message isn't sandwiched in between
a couple of commercials. Your readers may find your message
in their mailboxes next to other direct mail and you may
not reach your potential customers' on the same day as a
competitor does, but even so, your message will be handled
by itself. They won't read two letters at the same time.
You can get very specific and accurate about your target
market and the less money you'll actually spend advertising
to people who aren't even interested.
When you run a newspaper ad, not only will people who might
want your product or service see it, but people who don't
want it will see it to so there's more waste.
You might only mail to businesses in a certain zip code if
that was your target market. With business-to~business
direct mail, you can reach more than one person in the same
company. Some small firms actually sell their services to
many people and departments within one large corporation.
There are many different ways and databases that are
available to access your prospects. Short of being there
talking to someone, what's more immediate and personal than
a letter? Print, newspapers and radio still lack the
one-on-one urgency of a well written letter addressed to
the customer.
When you write these letters, you want to make sure you're
really writing to one person - not a market.
Telemarketing can even be more immediate and personal than
direct mail if it's properly done. As with direct mail,
there's a lot of wasted effort using the telephone for
marketing today.
The ability to make advertising work is really one of the
hardest things to do. It's especially important for small
businesses with limited budgets to try to do it properly.
Instead of just buying and doing image advertising and just
getting people to be aware of you, you want to ask for the
order or, you can do both.
More and more companies are actually learning that just
adding a toll-free 800 number in an ad can generate direct
response to their advertising while they're also
establishing the fact that they are there.
Gaining exposure and prompting orders can go hand-in-hand.
They're not the only things direct marketing can do. Direct
marketing Is the most testable form of advertising. Since
your marketing can be a direct response between it's
measurable, you can also test different forms of it in
every mailing.
Each direct response advertisement you run is an
opportunity to test something different, gain something
different, and improve it for future marketing campaigns.
You always have the opportunity of testing one mailing list
against another, or one headline against another, one offer
selling one thing against another.
You don't always want a maximum number of responses. Not
necessarily. You don't want to receive more inquiries for
orders than you can actually fulfill because that's not
going to look very good. You can spread them out over time
by mailing your letters spread out over time.
You can use direct marketing to build a database. Building
a database through direct marketing is self sustaining.
When a customer orders, you get a sale and new information
to add to your database. Many large and small companies use
direct response print ads offering free information. That
is just one way of building a database.
The better you're able to build, organize and use that
database, the better your direct marketing will be.
Improved direct marketing will yield additional information
on your existing companies and new information on your
prospects.
Don't ignore database marketing just because you're a
retail store. In the past, supermarkets have actually won
awards using direct mail to generate traffic into their
grocery stores, so it can be used in retail stores also,
The reason for maintaining a database is to keep selling
them. Your existing customers already know you, they've
bought from you, and more often than not, they'll buy from
you again. One of the first things you should learn about
direct marketing and marketing in general is that it is
much easier and cheaper to re-sell your existing customers
than it is to get a new customer.
In many businesses, people don't even show a profit on the
first sale - they lose money, but they make money on repeat
purchases.
About
The Author
Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, an advertising network company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and advertising. www.msmedianetwork.com
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