Direct Marketing
The section contains a wide variety of direct marketing planning checklists, charts, presentations, and white papers that will help you develop and execute more effective business-to-business (B2B) and business-consumer (B2C) direct marketing strategies, plans, and programs.
What is Direct Marketing?
"Direct Marketing is an interactive system of marketing which uses one or more advertising media to effect a measurable response and/or transaction at any location." It doesn't matter whether you are a supporter of McCarthy's "four Ps" or Lauterborn's "four Cs" , direct marketing is part of the marketing mix falling under either "promotions" or "communications".
In an "interactive system of marketing," the customer is capable of interacting with the seller by directly responding to an offer, and the response is direct and trackable. Examples of offers might be an email or land mail campaign that solicits a customer response; a TV ad/merchandise/infomercial offer that asks the respondent to order via a toll-free number or URL; or, a clickable response to a web-based ad for merchandise. In all cases the customer response can be tracked and the order fulfilled using a database. Any time a customer interacts with a seller, (responds with a request for more information or an order, etc., that response is trackable, logged into a database, and is therefore measurable.
The emphasis with Direct Marketing is on measurable. Direct Marketing differs from other forms of advertising in that the emphasis is placed on getting and tracking measurable results from programs.
Direct Marketing has the same function as advertising and other forms of promotion / communications, except that it requires the existence and maintenance of a database. The database is used to: record customer names; store and measure advertising results; store and measure purchasing performance; and continue direct communications with the customer.
Take the Direct Marketing Quiz - How's Your Organization Doing?
Find out how you're doing before you access our direct marketing tools and resources. Take the Direct Marketing Quiz. The quiz contains 49 questions that address key aspects of direct marketing. It will help you determine the current state of your direct marketing planning, practices and processes. Your answers will indicate specific areas where you may benefit from improvements. And, it will also help guide your decisions about your future marketing needs and investments. You will be given a score upon completion of the quiz.
Once you've completed the quiz, you can contact us to review your responses and provide an objective analysis of your current business and direct marketing planning efforts.