Direct Marketing- Boosts Business Results Through Systematically Winning You Quality Customers

Direct marketing addresses some of the biggest challenges in marketing a business - lead generation, converting those leads into high quality customers, and then systematically growing customer profitability. Marketing experts estimate that your prospects and customers are bombarded with more than 3000 marketing messages (direct mail, email marketing, radio/tv advertising, billboards) – every day. Direct marketing helps you get through the ‘marketing noise’, and delivers a high return on investment for your marketing spend.

With prospects being presented with so many choices, they seldom, if ever, buy at the first contact. In fact, it can take anything from 9 to 15 contacts before they have sufficient trust in you to finally buy your product.

Little wonder that so many entrepreneurs and sales people hate cold calling as the chances of early success are dismally low.

An alternative to the pain of cold calling is a consistent set of processes that attracts qualified leads to your business, and then keeps them ‘in the loop’ until they convert into customers.

Systematic Direct Marketing is that set of processes - a marketing strategy based on direct marketing methods which will deliver an immediate and sustainable sales improvement.

By improvements we mean:

• your lead generation costs will drop,
• converting leads into sales will not be due to profit-killing price discounts, and
• your quality clients will form enduring relationships - providing you with profitable repeat sales

The Highly Effective Cycle of Systematic Direct Marketing

In order to attract, retain and nurture a list of highly profitable customers, you need to craft your direct marketing strategy around a number of marketing activities that can start in a fairly simple way, but over time develop into a fairly sophisticated set of direct marketing processes.

If you cycle through the following direct marketing activities you will experience an unprecedented improvement in your business’s results:

Each direct marketing cycle will create a set of clients who can start providing you with referrals. These ‘lowest cost’ prospects will supplement the prospects that you attract through your normal ongoing lead generation techniques, yielding an ever-increasing prospect base for you to convert into customers.

If this is the solution, why isn’t everybody
adopting this Direct Marketing Strategy?

For starters, many business executives get seduced by glamour advertising – where advertising agencies vie to see how ‘creative’ they can be with your advertising budget. Sadly this approach is both expensive and ineffective. Even worse, no measurement criteria are established to track the effectiveness of these expensive adverts. Literally a case of pay and pray.

Possibly the main reason that many businesses don’t base their marketing strategy around direct marketing is that it requires setting up several interlinked marketing processes, and many smaller business owners don’t have the direct marketing know-how to do this.

The good news is that most of these marketing ‘systems’ are not too difficult to set up, and many are relatively inexpensive to implement. The smart approach to systematic direct marketing is to introduce the easy / low-cost approaches first, and then use the newly-generated additional cash flow to fund the more sophisticated and more expensive methods.

via: systematicdirectmarketing