How to Create a Direct Marketing Campaign

Direct marketing campaigns generally try to create communication directly between your business and an audience such as the consumer of your product, without having to go through intermediaries, such as you would if you bought advertising in a newspaper or on a television station.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Decide what response you want from recipients of your marketing materials. You need to convey a call to action--a request for recipients to complete a specific action. It can be simply visiting a website or it can be purchasing a product or service from your company.

2. Determine your target demographic and either generate a contact list or purchase a mailing list. Good sources of contacts for your list include your past clients and members of your business network.

3. Choose a method of direct marketing, such as sending out a mailer or emailing a newsletter, and create marketing materials for that medium. Printing and mailing out your materials is typically the most expensive option, but it is the only method that will get a response from some categories of recipients.

4. Follow through on your planned campaign. Mail or email your marketing materials and track the responses you receive. You may receive notification that an email account is closed or a potential recipient is no longer at the mailing address you have listed. Update your contact list where possible.

5. Analyze responses to your marketing campaign. This information can help you to improve your future campaigns as well as determine the effectiveness of your current campaign.

Tips & Warnings

• Depending on your experience with direct marketing campaigns, you may consider hiring a specialist to create yours, or develop specific elements of it. A direct marketing specialist should be able to supply you with samples of past campaigns as well as an idea of the response they generated.
• Some direct marketing techniques are especially useful for developing long-term relationships with your clients, such as publishing a regularly scheduled newsletter.
• Online direct marketing campaigns are typically the least expensive types of campaigns you can implement.
• Direct marketing campaigns often have very low response rates. You may need to send out thousands of copies of your marketing materials to generate even a few responses.
• Many consumers view direct marketing negatively and throw it away without even looking at it. Targeting your demographic as closely as possible is the best way to limit this category of non-response.

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