What is Direct Marketing and How to Do It Successfully?

What exactly is direct marketing and how can you build your strategy?  Direct marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods and has many benefits, including clearly measurable results.

Making marketing science is one of our passions, so in this article, I’ll explain the benefits of digital direct marketing, show some examples, and explain the steps to a successful campaign.

It is important to learn about marketing automation tools that can help the performance of any strategy. There are free and paid ones, you just have to know how to choose the one that best suits each case.

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing is a type of advertising campaign that seeks to achieve a specific action in a selected group of consumers (such as an order, a visit to a store or website, or a request for information) in response to communication activities carried out by the marketer. This communication can take many different formats, such as postal mail, telemarketing, point of sale, etc.  One of the most interesting methods is direct email marketing.

An essential aspect of direct marketing is that the consumer’s response is measurable: for example, if you offer a discount for an online store, you must include some type of cookie or pixel so that you know if the user has used the code.

Advantages of Direct Marketing

Direct marketing allows you to promote your product or service directly to your target audience and quickly measure results, but the benefits don’t stop there. Here are 6 benefits of digital direct marketing:

1. High segmentation and targeting. One of the great advantages of this type of marketing is that you can reach your specific audience segments with personalized messages. If you want to be successful, you need to spend time researching and identifying the consumers most likely to convert and therefore directing your efforts towards actions that really work.
2. Optimize your marketing budget.  Targeting direct online marketing to a specific audience allows you to set realistic goals and improve your sales on a tight budget. If you optimize your direct campaign properly, you’ll get results for just a few percent of the cost of traditional advertising.
3. Increase your sales with current and former customers.  Digital direct marketing allows you to communicate with your current customers to keep the relationship alive while adding value. It also allows you to get back in touch with old customers and generate new leads.
4. Update your loyalty strategies.  Direct contact with your customers allows you to personalize your promotions, emails, and offers to create an instant bond. To maximize results, you can combine your direct marketing methods with your loyalty program.
5. Create new business opportunities.  Direct marketing allows you to adapt to the demands of the market at all times and respond more effectively.
6. Test and analyze the results.  Direct response campaigns give you the opportunity to directly measure your results. Take the opportunity to get the most out of your tests and make decisions in real-time. 

Start A Direct Email Marketing Campaign

Ready to start? We will explain step by step how to launch a direct mail campaign: 

• Develop your contact list.  The first step in developing a direct email marketing campaign is knowing who you are targeting. In the market, you can find many industry email lists, but you need to take your personalization further and find users who are really interested in your product. To get leads, you can try a content-based inbound marketing campaign (like downloads of an ebook) or lead generation ads on Twitter. Whatever you do, don’t forget everything you need to segment your contact list, for example, how often they visit your site or the products they are interested in. 
• Create the ideal email.  Email subject line, text, icons, and call to action… Nothing in your email marketing campaign should be random. Align creativity and segmentation. 
• Enter an identification code or pixel.  As mentioned above, one of the keys to direct marketing is the ability to accurately measure all results. To do this, you need to include a pixel code in your emails that identifies users who have reached your site through this particular campaign.
• Try the campaign.  Leverage your email campaigns to A/B test and find out what really works with your audience. Subject, images, button, send time… try all possible variants.
• Put a campaign in progress.  Send a test email to make sure everything runs smoothly and launch your campaign. But beware! As with social networks and other digital advertising tools, you must send it at an ideal time and day to avoid downtime if you do not want to be forgotten.  

• Consumer responses.  Ready! Now it only remains to wait to see the reactions of your target. Allow a reasonable window of time before jumping to conclusions, as not everyone checks their email instantly.
• Analyze the results of the campaign.  Lastly, you need to measure how well your campaign has performed. How many people have opened the mail, clicked, or converted? If you have tried multiple versions, which one has worked best and why? Use these takeaways for your next campaign and see how quickly you’ll launch a truly effective direct marketing campaign. 

Remember, good planning and having a good marketing tool are the keys to success for digital marketers. Good luck with your direct marketing campaigns!