by Nathan Rothfield
If you’re wondering about the value of direct response marketing, this guide provides a helpful overview.
But before companies can get serious about direct response marketing, they need to understand the essential difference between direct marketing response campaigns and indirect ones.
Indirect response marketing
When your long-term aim is to create brand awareness, build relationships or inform, you’re engaged in indirect response marketing. This could be an email newsletter, blog article or a social media post campaign. You’re not actively trying to sell a service or product.
Direct response marketing
Direct response marketing, on the other hand, is very specific in its focus, with the goal being an immediate direct response from a target audience to a direct response ad asking them to do something.
The characteristics of a direct response ad are:
—it is targeted
—states a specific offer
—defines the benefits
—includes a specific call-to-action
—is trackable and measurable
There are plenty of benefits of direct response campaigns, but here are the top 6 that prove direct response marketing works:
Generate Leads
When you want high-quality leads, a direct response campaign offers the chance to target them specifically and create great leads for future sales.
Create a sense of urgency
The best direct response ads create a sense of urgency to act. The call to action helps overcome prospects’ reluctance and gives you an immediate result.
Save money
This isn’t shotgun advertising where you spray a ton of money around hoping for success. Direct response marketing strategies are highly targeted, so you can save money and reach unqualified leads.
Track results
It doesn’t matter what marketing channels you use, direct response is trackable, so you can count how many impressions your direct response advertising received and converted.
Gain high value leads
Often your CTA is to capture email addresses, which makes responders warm leads. Once they’re in the sales funnel as potential customers, you can build the relationships to make them existing customers.
Measure results
ROI matters to enterprise businesses, so measuring your investment, leads received, channel performance and leads converted can improve your results.
A successful direct response campaign takes many forms, limited only by your creativity.
Direct Mail
Often overlooked, direct mail can still play a huge role in your marketing strategy. Many people like getting postal mail when it has a value beyond ‘junk’, which comes back to your creativity.
For example, more than 100 million US customers made a catalogue purchase in 2016, which is a lot of lead generation.
You can add QR codes to direct mail to help track and integrate any immediate response of customer behaviour into the digital domain.
Social media ads
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and LinkedIn are very useful channels for direct response marketing campaigns.
Over 25% of social media users research and find products on social media. The ability to target a specific audience and generate leads quickly is second to none.
Email is a great tool that can leverage direct response actions, like UberEats sending a direct response email to prompt users to continue with a purchase when they have abandoned their cart.
It’s also good for flash sales and for ‘scarcity’ marketing campaigns about upcoming events selling fast, filling up or becoming unavailable.
Contests and giveaways
You can build brand awareness as well as stimulate brand engagement with contests and giveaways.
Giveaways are a productive direct response marketing technique to spread the word about new services or products.
Contests with a clear call to action can give your target audience motivation to contribute user-generated content, which you can then use in future direct response marketing campaigns.
Referral programs
Because customers significantly trust friends and family’s recommendations over advertising, referral programs are an effective direct response marketing strategy. All you need to do is apply creativity to reward your target audience with the right incentive to make a referral to their friends.
Harry’s
A men’s grooming company, Harry’s, used a direct response campaign that differentiated it from competitors Dollar Shave Club and Gillette’s television commercials. Choosing a referral program, they asked existing customers to invite a friend to join Harry’s launch list.
Because it was a personalised approach from a friend, the referral program was a viral success and built their customer base to one million customers in only two years — an effective direct response.
Salesmate
A classic direct response marketing campaign giveaway run by Salesmate was the offer of cold email templates in exchange for the email address of potential customers.
After this initial offer, Salesmate followed up with an email offering more content of interest, and eventually a specific offer for a free trial of their sales email tracking software on a landing page.
Terry White Chemmart
Rothfield manages Terry White Chemmart’s direct response campaigns at a scale that any enterprise business would admire. This includes a holistic end-to-end solution of:
—the print production of multiple marketing campaigns per year, comprising retail catalogues, flyers and associated POS
—including distribution across 400+ network of stores
—including the pick and packing of up to 60 products in the associated kits
—totalling 1.6 million catalogues and 100,000 flyers produced
Our Direct Communications services help many enterprise businesses with direct marketing campaign material.
Intelligent Direct Mail solutions
We can help you target your existing customer database down to a granular detail with automatically personalised content in direct mail marketing material and direct response advertisements.
Email Marketing
We make it easy to create marketing from a single-source brand management platform in the cloud, Rothfield Connect. Smart templates keep your emails on brand plus give you a full analytics suite on your lead generation.
Campaign and Data Management
You can easily produce examples of direct response ads by automating the production of personalised collateral. And you’ll have complete visibility with transparent pricing, customised reporting and goods tracking data.
Secure Data Storage
Our data storage is in the cloud with enterprise-level security and 24/7 online access from anywhere in Australia.
We deliver high-impact print solutions that consolidate your supply chains and guarantee cost savings.
Document Finishing
Whatever direct response advertising you’re making, our dynamic, customised and consistent templates make producing marketing collateral too easy.
We’re always working on ways to offer innovative sustainable print solutions, such as providing our clients with recycled paper stock options.
We can help give your enterprise business a boost with impactful direct response marketing that supports your sales goals.
Learn more about the business solutions we can offer, including a direct response marketing campaign, to match your needs and individual industry landscape.
For more information about how we can help your next marketing campaign get a successful direct response:
