Direct Marketing

Direct Marketing


If one of human’s biggest mistakes is failing from learning from the past, the same applies to marketing. With the Internet changing the way we look at selling your product, you have to resist the excitement created by the new technologies and forget what matters to your business: whether your prospects are buying your products. So before your grandfather starts his monologue by saying ‘’when I was your age’’, let’s take a brief look at direct marketing and what it can do for your online business.

According to Wilkipedia, Direct marketing is a discipline within marketing that involves the planned recording, analysis and tracking of individual customers' (business-to-business or consumer) responses and transactions for the purpose of developing and prolonging mutually profitable customer relationships. In simple terms, it means gathering as much information as possible about your audience: What do they want? What is their age group? Do they share the same hobby? When you compile as much data as possible from your audience, you start to create a personal bond. When that bond is solid enough, it’s almost a slam dunk to make the sale.

One of the biggest mistakes of today’s online marketers is not using what has been proved to work. The Internet might be a revolutionary channel of information, but the human’s genes were not scientifically modified with its arrival. The presentation might have changed, but the content remains the same: we buy on emotion then rationalize our decisions. Why change the magic formula with a lengthy flash introduction or unreadable fonts?

All of this is interesting, you say, but what about my internet business? How can I run a direct marketing campaign through my website? Well, you can run a direct marketing campaign in three easy steps:

1- Start to collect every particle of information about your prospect. Looks at the logs on your website. Does your traffic always visit the same link? What do they click? You can also ask your visitors to participate in a online survey and ask specific demographic questions, or see if they respond to certain promotions.

2- Now you need to analyze the data. Did he buy from you in the past? If so, what did he like / dislike about the product you are selling? What would he change if he had the chance? Put yourself in his shoes, and try thinking like he does.

3- Finally, you need to adjust your website’s sales message to reflect your prospect’s different emotions, mix them together, and integrate them on your web site. If your survey revealed that a particular benefit of your product came out on top in your survey, imagine how much sales can be increased by focusing your copy on that specific benefit?

As a recap, direct marketing is the science of finding as much as possible about your prospect, then using that information to adjust and personalize your sales message. It is all about forging that personal bond.

Direct Marketing