Leveraging Customers With Direct Marketing: Why & How to Do It?

Standing out from the crowd, attracting customers, leading them towards making buying decisions and retaining them… Those have always been important goals for every business and for every marketer. In today’s world, though, when people are constantly bombarded with content and with marketing messages for that matter, standing out has become a lot more difficult than before.

Just because things have become a bit more difficult, though, it doesn’t mean that they are impossible. And, it certainly doesn’t mean that you should stop trying and give up, not knowing exactly how to make a name for yourself and how to stand out from the crowd. The truth is, you can learn. Plus, there are some quite useful strategies you can use to your advantage so as to make the standing out part much easier, including, of course, direct marketing strategies that have proven to be of great help in this regard.

Have you ever heard of direct marketing before? Are you curious about how you can leverage customers with those strategies? Do you want to find out why it is that you should use this strategy to your advantage, as well as how to use it the right way? Those are certainly all some important questions, and below I am going to provide you with the answers, hoping to help you get a clearer understanding about how all of this works and why it may be the right strategy for you.

First, What Is Direct Marketing?

We are, naturally, going to begin with the very basics here. In order to find out how you can leverage customers with direct marketing, you will first need to get a better understanding of what this strategy actually is and what it entails. If you’ve heard about it before, then you may have some ideas about what it means, but it is time to be a bit more precise about it and to make things perfectly clear.

Direct marketing is that form of marketing that is focused on communicating, well, directly to the customers and clients, aiming at promoting a product or a service, and at ultimately making a sale. While e-mail marketing is one of the most useful and most used forms of this strategy, there are others that businesses can employ and use to their advantage. Those include social media DM responses, promotional flyers, coupons, mail-order catalogues, telemarketing, and even door-to-door visits.

Here’s some more info on the strategy: https://www.einsteinmarketer.com/what-is-direct-marketing/ 

While a direct marketing campaign can also reach a large number of people, that is, a huge audience, the point is in making every part of it feel as if it were a one-on-one conversation between a potential customer and your brand. It is this type of a personalized approach that customers value and that they will remember. And it is that very approach that can convince people to take a specific action, such as visit a website, give contact information, make a call to get more info about certain products and services, and even make a purchase.

Various personalization techniques are used here. For example, marketers will use the customers’ first names to address them, as well as reference to some actions that they have previously taken. This results in a better overall experience for the customer. Everyone likes a personalized approach, so there is no doubt that your prospects will too.

Why Use It to Your Advantage?

So as to be able to decide whether you want to use this strategy to your advantage or not, you will need to understand its benefits first. Below I will talk about some of those benefits in a bit more details, hoping to help you make your final decision. Once you understand the value that the strategy brings to the table, you probably won’t have a difficult time making up your mind regarding what to do.

First off, the personalized messages allow for better segmentation and targeting. Take your time to identify those prospects that are more likely to convert. And then, create those personalized messages to target those specific segments of your audience and to, thus, push them towards the conversion decision and achieve your goal.

Communicating with your potential, current and former clients directly will also lead to boosting sales. Furthermore, by customizing your promotions and your e-mail content to meet their needs, you will eventually build loyalty. And, naturally, the direct marketing strategy will also help you tap into new opportunities and use them effectively to your advantage.

It is also important to mention that this particular strategy will help you test and measure your results more successfully and pretty much in real time. Thus, you will get to make quick and smart decisions about what to do next and which actions to take towards meeting your goals. It is by now perfectly clear to everyone why marketing matters, as explained here further, and I suppose that you also understand completely what it is that direct marketing brings to the table and how it can be quite an advantageous strategy.

How to Use It Right?

The only question you have right now is how you can use direct marketing to your advantage the right way. Taking random steps and hoping for the best is not exactly a wise idea. There are specific strategies that should be a part of this type of a campaign, and you have to understand those better and use them to achieve the specific goals. Those include direct mail marketing, e-mail marketing, telemarketing, SMS marketing, as well as personalized landing pages.

If you are not completely sure about how to use all of those strategies correctly, the best thing to do is either learn from the experts, or hire experts to do it for you. Sometimes, it is the latter that will bring the most value to the table, given that professionals will already have the necessary knowledge and they will be able to start working on the perfect strategies right away. Just make sure, of course, to choose and hire the right professionals.