Article Pool

Free Article Directory!

• Home
• Submit Article
• Recent Articles
• Top Authors
• Top Articles
• Article Distribution Service
• Article Writing

Direct Marketing: Overlooked, Underappreciated and Unstoppable

Published by Jesse Holmes | October 9th 2009 | Views:

Loading

|

As business leaders and professionals, we all know by now thatthe success of an organization is driven by one thing: whetheror not people choose to buy what you've got to sell. Accordingto a recent survey involving U.S. senior executives, marketingwill be the most important area of expertise for thenext-generation of leaders. Every business needs customers, butmore importantly every business needs to maintain thosecustomers while constantly retaining new ones. The onlysuccessful way of doing this is by learning everything aboutyour customers, including who they are? What do they have incommon? Do they share a hobby, an age range, a life stage, or ageographic community? Can you break them down into groups? Theanswers to these questions hold a wealth of information for you.

Although direct marketing can be overlooked by many businesses,here are statistics proving the effectiveness of direct mailcampaigns over the years.

According to the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) 2005 Postaland Email Marketing Report:

* For postal mailings, 43% of direct marketers indicated thattheir up-front gross response has increased from 2003 to 2002. *As with postal mailings, when asked about 2004, respondentsshowed more optimism in their up-front email response rates,with 51% projecting an increase and 32% stable response rates. *For postal mailers, the top list techniques used to improve 2003front-end response were enhancements to internal houses the top minds of our worldto analyze and build databases and marketing campaigns toaddress only the concerns and needs of a selected audience,which history has proven to be accurate 70% of the time.Typically, budgets are based more on analyzing the product,service and/or the consumer rather than playing an ROI guessinggame.

Brief Case Study of a Client

Here is a case study of a client that used direct marketing toincrease their bottom line:

Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corporation (AHMCC), the largestU.S. privately held mortgage banker/mortgage broker initiated amore sophisticated form of direct mail marketing in 2003, whichincluded the use of opt-in email files and multi-level marketingto reach new customers. The results were that AHMCC increasedtheir revenues by 100% and increased their closing ratio by 15%by using email alone. Customer loyalty went up and referrals hitthe roof. AHMCC now has 700 offices in 49 states, Guam and theVirgin Islands!

As the marketplace continues to evolve and change due theeconomic landscape and the need to offset expensive adcampaigns, direct marketing continues to play a major role forthe success of any sized business. Regardless of the negativeconnotations that the public has on direct marketing, the truthof the matter is that corporations are vehicles that satisfy theneeds of people and marketing is the channel that helpsfacilitate this process.

Ultimately, in order to be successful, companies must learn tomaintain the loyalty of their customers and get in front of newones by practicing 1 simple rule: Providing good product andservice to the right people, at the right time, in the rightplace and in the right way.


Rate this article:

Total Vote: 0, Rating: 0/5




Comments (0)
Post a Comment