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About Direct Marketing
What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing is direct communication to a consumer or business recipient that is designed to generate a response. The response can be anything from a instant purchase, registration, request for more information, or visit to a brick-and-morter or online store for purchase of a something specific. Driving someone to take action is the goal. Direct Marketing magazine defines it as: "an interactive system of marketing that uses one or more advertising media to effect a measurable response and/or transaction at any location, with this activity stored on a database."
Manage What You Measure and Measure What You Manage
Providing the customer with information relative to their needs and interests has always been the best "carrot" to use for triggering responses. A recent Bear Stearns profile on the direct and interactive marketing industry offers a helpful way of looking at it as a cyclical process with six distinct phases:
- Creative and design - selecting marketing plans, media channels, graphics and copy;
- Data compilation - internal data, such as customer lists...and outside data from a database company or list broker are assembled;
- Database management - information is purged, enhanced and standardized;
- Database analysis - further focuses on an optimal target market;
- Execution and fulfillment - customer inquiries and orders are acted upon through selected media channels; and...
- Response analysis - where the results of the campaign are examined for effectiveness. Results are used to help refine the process which is repeated.
As direct marketers continue to focus on attaining customer acquisition, service and value in traditional as well as new media, it becomes more important than ever to measure what you manage and manage what you measure. DMAW provides it members with the skill sets and resources to cost-effectively attain those goals.
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