Direct Marketing – What It Is And Why You Should Use It

What is direct marketing and why should you use it?

You work in marketing, so you’re used to being hated. Okay, not real hate. But let’s be honest — the various pejoratives people use to describe marketing they don’t like continue to grow in number. “Annoying commercials,” “junk mail,” “online ad blockers” — people go to great lengths just to avoid seeing marketing. 

Yet, they continue to be bombarded by it everywhere they go. And most importantly, they continue to respond to it. Marketing still works. And direct marketing, when done well, works better. 

The funny thing is, the marketing content some consumers say they don’t like isn’t necessarily distinct from the marketing that works. Consumers will tell you they get annoyed by ads, but those same consumers respond to them, and alter their behavior because of the marketing they see. 

That’s why whether people love or hate your marketing is irrelevant. You want to do what works. There are Super Bowl commercials that make people laugh, but can they remember the name of the company behind the commercial ten minutes later? If not — it’s a failure of marketing. 

Direct marketing works better than brand-centric general advertising. You’re about to see why. We’ll look at several forms of direct marketing, and explore how you can use it to build revenue and increase profits.

What is direct marketing?

Direct marketing refers to any marketing that targets specifically-chosen individual consumers. Direct marketing aims to make direct contact with potential customers who share common attributes that relate to the offer being made in the campaign.

The list

In direct marketing, there’s always a list. That list can be very large, such as a credit card company mailing out a million letters promoting a new service to consumers who exhibit a pre-chosen set of characteristics. Or, it can be very small, such as a B2B marketer reaching out with a LinkedIn message to ten CEOs of companies in certain industries. 

You can form a list defining your intended audience based on just about any traits or behaviors you can imagine:

• Women over 40 who have a family history of breast cancer and who have donated to charity
• Households that own two or more cars in two specific suburbs of Houston
• Customers from an in-house list who responded to an email offer last year
• All households in one zip code
• Consumers who have purchased solar panels within the last five years in the state of Arizona

The quality of the list is the single greatest factor in the success of a direct marketing campaign. 

The best copywriting, the best headline, the best call to action, the perfect images, and the most compelling testimonials will mean absolutely nothing if the list of potential customers is not aligned with the marketing message.

Direct marketing thus depends on knowing who you are marketing to, and then finding a list of people who match that description. 

A personalized offer

Because you’re sending direct marketing to specific types of people, you can use personalized messages that are specific and relevant to them. 

Direct marketing is where a headline like “Are you tired of weeds in your yard?” comes from. Direct marketers don’t send that sort of message to people who live in apartments, or to renters or businesses. And if they’re smart, and most direct marketers are, they don’t send it to neighborhoods where it’s evident most residents don’t care about having a top-notch lawn.

Direct marketing speaks to the audience the marketers had in mind when they created the campaign.

Some direct marketing messages even put the recipient’s name in the headline or elsewhere in the copy. 

How is direct marketing different from advertising?

Traditional marketing and advertising, as opposed to direct marketing, does not require a list of specific individuals. It’s not direct communication to pre-chosen recipients. It’s indirect marketing, using other methods to increase the chances some of your ideal customers will see your ads.

This does not mean there’s no target audience, or that some attempt isn’t made to send the advertising to an audience more likely to respond to it. For instance, in traditional media buying, you can buy TV commercials on certain shows or channels that are more likely to be watched by your potential customers. Addressable TV ads (shown to specific individuals)? That’s quickly approaching direct marketing. 

But traditional advertising does not feature a specific list of individuals receiving your promotional messages. Direct marketing differs in that it entails much more personalized outreach.  

Media channels suitable for direct marketing campaigns

Direct marketing can work in more media channels than you might think. Here are some of the most common direct marketing channels:

Direct mail

When you think of a mailing list, direct mail is probably the first thing that comes to mind. Most direct mail is also direct marketing, because someone curated the list of potential customers. 

Sometimes, it’s very vague such as zip codes, or to residents within a certain radius of a store. But even those — the idea is that the recipients of that marketing can actually respond to the offer and visit the store, because it’s not very far away. 

Front door marketing

Also known as door hanger distribution or flyer distribution, front door marketing is like a superpower version of direct mail. Everything direct mail does, front door marketing can do better. 

The reason is because you get a higher response rate. Because it’s alone on the front porch, visually distinct, and uncommon, it gets attention. Recipients have to interact with door hangers. They can’t be missed, skipped, or blocked. It doesn’t get perceived as “junk mail.”. Thus, in digital marketing language, front door marketing gets more impressions. With more impressions comes a higher response rate, more conversions, and more revenue. 

Email Marketing

If you have an email list, you know something about the people who are on it. You can send email marketing campaigns specifically to them, and you can make certain assumptions about them. The more data you have, the more targeted and personalized your email marketing can be. And in theory, since everyone on your email list opted in or consented to be there, they are not surprised when you email them. In theory.

Social media Marketing

To be clear, a lot of social media marketing is not direct marketing. Paying for ads, boosting posts, making regular posts — none of these things count as direct marketing because you don’t know who sees it. You are not choosing the list of recipients. 

But, if you craft a social media marketing campaign and send it exclusively to your followers, to people who’ve been to your site or visited a specific page, that could be considered direct marketing. And you can get pretty specific by further filtering those people by additional conditions like location, basic demographics, and more.

In-person marketing

Live events such as presentations from the stage or booths at a trade show count as direct marketing, because you are reaching anyone who’s in the room. And if it’s a conference or trade show, you know something about these people. People who attend a gardening expo probably have gardens or work with people who do. It’s a safe assumption. 

A webinar would also count as direct marketing, because you can send targeted messages directly to all your attendees — even the ones who registered but didn’t show up. 

Is direct response marketing the same thing as direct marketing? 

Now, you might be getting a little antsy, because it feels like we’re leaving out a lot of things you thought were direct marketing. What you may be thinking of is called direct response marketing. It’s just got one extra word. How different can it be?

Well, it is different.

This marketing approach adds on the requirement that the people receiving this marketing can respond to it, and that those responses can be measured, tracked, and followed up on. 

In theory, you could do direct marketing without it being direct response. 

For example, imagine a music store sending a postcard campaign to households with children ages 5 to 17 within a ten-mile radius of the store. That’s direct marketing. However, if that marketing just promotes the music store but doesn’t offer anything or provide a specific way to respond, it’s not direct response. 

Maybe it has pictures of kids playing instruments, the name of the store, a map to the location, and information about classes. People might respond to this — but you won’t know it in most cases because you didn’t link that response to the promotional materials.

Measureable

Direct response is measurable. We sent out 1000 postcards. 25 people called the number. 16 came into the store. 11 made a purchase. 

You also know how much you spent on the campaign, so you can calculate valuable metrics like cost per mailing, cost per acquisition, return on investment, and numerous others. For this particular marketing technique, customer engagement like opening, clicking, making comments, or visiting web pages isn’t enough. It’s about revenue-related actions. 

But you can measure actions like requesting a lead magnet, registering for a webinar, or signing up for a demo, because those are key parts of sales funnels and lead to opportunities for direct selling.

Replicable

Because it’s measurable, you can also replicate it. Suppose one campaign worked for the first 1000 addresses. And to be clear, “worked” means you generated an acceptable return that you can measure and directly attribute to the marketing campaign. So now, you can find another 1000 and send the same campaign to them. 

As long as the second list has the same attributes as the first list, you can expect a similar response rate and similar profits. 

Testable

Because you’re measuring it, you can also test it. Running with our music store example, maybe you create two versions of your marketing campaign. Different headlines, a different picture, and maybe a couple other changes. You send 500 to half the list and 500 the other half. 

If one version performs statistically better than the other, you then take that one and send it to the next list of 1000 potential customers. Or, you create a third version and test that against the winner from the first campaign.

In this way, you can continually optimize and improve your direct marketing efforts.

All this to say, direct marketing does not have to use direct response. But it works a whole lot better if it does.

Can you also do direct response advertising?

Because the key difference is in being measurable, you can also create direct response advertising, even though it isn’t direct marketing. How so?

Now is when you bring in online advertising channels like pay-per-click (PPC) ads, infomercials, radio and TV ads, and many others. Though these do not feature a curated list, you can still measure the response against the budget and the number of impressions, clicks, or other traffic metrics. But you can only do that if you again align the response with the advertising.

For example, a TV commercial advertising a car brand that features cool images and the logo at the end is just generic advertising. It’s not super measurable. It’s hard to prove that a specific ad actually led to any purchases or revenue.

But the same car company could create another marketing campaign — for television — that ends with a call to action saying to “Call before the month ends and get $2000 cash back.” Now, this ad has become direct response advertising. Because now, everyone who calls that number and makes a purchase will be known, and you’ll know they are responding to that ad.

A quick recap so far

Here’s what we’ve said so far:

Direct marketing: Has a curated list of recipients

What does a campaign cost?

Get a custom-built sample campaign with real targeting data, ad creative, cost estimates, and distribution plans.

Use the Project Estimator

Direct response marketing: Curated list also includes measurable offer and CTA

Advertising: No specific list of recipients. 

Direct response advertising: No specific list, but does include a measurable offer and CTA

Benefits of direct marketing — why it’s better

You’ve probably already figured out several reasons why direct marketing outshines regular advertising. Here are the main advantages it offers.

Know your numbers

In marketing, it’s easy to just spend, spend, spend, and never really know if what you’re spending is helping or hurting your company. With direct marketing — as long as you track things properly — you will know your numbers. And that means you’ll be able to evaluate success or failure based on something more than if the ad was funny or if the graphic design looked cool.

Empowered to improve and optimize

With your numbers in hand, you can now see how well your marketing campaigns succeeded. The more you do it, the more experience you get at understanding what seems to work with your potential customers. And that matters — what works for a different audience might not be right for yours.

Only do what works — save money

Knowing what worked well saves you money because you will stop doing the things that don’t work. Imagine sending two campaigns. One produces a positive ROI that is decent but not great, and the other gets barely a trickle. You learned something. Trash the second campaign, and figure out how to improve and optimize the first. 

And in future campaigns to the same audience, use some of the same strategies that worked the last time for the new offer and new CTA.

Less waste, more cost-effective

Spray and pray advertising costs a lot more money, and is harder to measure for its effectiveness. For instance, TV ads are expensive. If you’re going to run a TV campaign during a live sports event, that might cost you millions of dollars, depending on the event. 

Is that expense worth it? What if you took half that money and instead spent it on some effective direct marketing campaigns with specific audiences, targeted offers, clear calls to action, and measurable response rates? 

With the first approach, you really have no idea if you got anything for the millions spent on the sports ad. With the second approach, you get all the benefits of direct marketing. 

How to develop a direct marketing strategy

Though it can work very well, direct marketing isn’t something to just throw together on the weekend while watching TV and surfing the web. Effective direct marketing work depends on two things: The right list, and good planning.

Here’s a good process you can follow as you develop your direct marketing strategy:

Define the marketing goal

Direct marketing that works needs a problem to solve for your potential customers. This is where it all begins. 

Your customers have a pain point. A frustration. An annoyance. A desire. A need. A wish. A “wouldn’t it be great if” idea rolling around in their heads. 

And you have the solution. One or more of your products or services has the answers your intended audience is longing for, even if they don’t know it, for their pain point. 

You build your campaign around their problem, and your solution. That’s your goal — to deliver a solution your customers must have. If you succeed in that, they will pay you for the answers.

Define the target audience

With the problem defined and the goal established, you need to flesh out the details of who you are targeting for this particular goal. 

You might have a number of products and services. Not all of them solve all the same problems. Which means not all of them are the right answer for a broad audience. Who, specifically, needs this solution? 

Again, consider the many possible characteristics of a target customer, in all the categories:

• Demographic — age, race, gender, family status, etc
• Geographic — could be country, state, city, or even certain streets
• B2B or B2C — and if B2B, which industry, and which niche and sub-niche within that industry?
• Psychographic — interests, desires, needs
• Consumer behavior — past purchases, clicks, opens, forms filled out, demos requested

The clearer picture you can create of your ideal potential customers, the more successful your direct marketing campaign will be at getting their attention, inciting a response, and making a sale.

Decide on which media to use

Different target audiences tend to congregate and utilize different media. You might laugh, but some people still use the phone book. If your target audience is retirees in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, the phone book might still make sense. That’s not direct marketing though because you aren’t communicating directly to your list. But it serves as an example of how you need to think about media.

Do you have an email list for your target audience? If not, you probably won’t be able to use email marketing, unless you can strike a deal with another company who does have a list of your ideal prospects and will allow you to use it. It’s not wise these days to use purchased lists for email campaigns, because sending email marketing to people who haven’t consented to it can get you in hot water.

Can you rent or purchase a mailing list for a print ads mailing campaign? That’s a great option if you can get the right list. 

With Power Direct, you can do that, and you can also use our treasure trove of demographic and psychographic customer data to create a front door marketing campaign. Remember, the benefits of door hanger distribution are even stronger than mail. And with Power Direct, you can narrow down your list to specific streets, even specific houses on a street. 

For example, we once did a campaign to certain neighborhoods in one city — and only to homes that owned pools. That’s how specific you can get with front door marketing.

Curate your list of prospects

With your media channel chosen, it’s now time to collect your list of potential customers.

If your campaign will be going to existing customers or to people in your customer database, such as followers on your social media platforms or email subscribers, you may decide to segment that list into smaller groups that will be more receptive to this particular direct marketing campaign. 

If you need to go outside your own customer data resources, there are numerous companies out there — including Power Direct — who have access to third party customer data. 

In fact, our California-based data scientists have proprietary targeting capabilities like no one else. We can identify the exact streets of the people most likely to respond to your campaigns. Learn a bit more about our industry-leading data and targeting capabilities. 

Create the offer and call to action

With your list in hand and your audience defined, you can now begin thinking about what makes them unique. How do they talk? What matters to them? What do they want? One famous campaign featured a small book available in grocery stores. Its title was “Wet Bed?” That was it. 

But with just two words, the target audience for that campaign was clear. Anyone who knows, knows what that’s about, and will be looking for answers. 

And that’s not an offer, just a title. But the title implies an offer, because it implies a solution. And you can guess something of what the offer might be — some sort of solution to help out the kiddos. That’s why knowing your offer and call to action are so important. Everything else you create for your direct marketing campaign flows out of the offer and CTA — for this specific audience.

Your offer must be:

• Specific — what do they get, how much is it, how do they get it
• Aligned with the target audience — speaks to what they want or need
• Clear — no confusion allowed with direct marketing offers
• Compelling and emotional — it must arouse desire and motivate action — “I want this”

The best offers promise something the target audience wants, in a way that makes it seem like they have to have it.

The offer then pairs up with the CTA. Again, this must be crystal clear. Does the potential customer know what to do to take up the offer? 

With direct marketing, this can mean telling them a local or toll free phone number, email address, website, landing page, SMS shortcode, QR code, store to visit, or whatever other action they must take to claim the offer. 

Where do they go? What do they do? Spell it out. Don’t assume they’ll figure something out that isn’t there. Don’t rely on them to “go online” without telling them exactly where to go.

Create the marketing content

At this point, you have assembled all the core components of your direct marketing campaign. Now, it’s time to create the rest of your marketing materials.

Find the images you’ll need. Write headlines. Depending on what you’re selling, you may need to write bullet points, lead copy, persuasive text, benefits, outcomes, and features. You might want to use a guarantee. Locate some testimonials related to this product, or your company if it’s a new product. 

Then get with your design team to assemble it for your campaign. If you’re using door hangers, for example, Power Direct can help you with a winning design. We deliver millions of pieces each year for America’s top brands. We know what works. 

Send it out and measure the results

Then, you’re ready to send out the campaign. Pick the dates you want it to go out. Send it out. And measure the results using whatever systems are appropriate for your chosen form of media. 

Some channels, such as email marketing, can generate an immediate response. Direct mail and front door marketing take a few days, depending on the size of the campaign.

And that’s it.

Use Power Direct for a flyer distribution campaign

If you want to do direct marketing, and have never tried front door marketing, you may find this to be the missing piece of the marketing puzzle you’ve been looking for. 

Door hangers are direct, effective, captivating, engaging, and attention-getting. They can’t be overlooked. Consumers must interact with them. And that’s fine because… they’re fun! 

Digital marketing has its place, but door hangers are something you can show people, take to meetings and conferences, and keep for years as samples and examples. You don’t have to stare at screens to see the campaign. 

And with Power Direct, you can create custom shaped door hangers. We’ve sent out campaigns featuring a variety of unique shapes, including a dog bone, a frozen pancake, and even a toilet. 

Get a free project estimate AND a free Ad Targeting Report you can keep and use however you want.