As a founder or young entrepreneur, in most cases the focus is on gaining new customers and retaining regular customers . This is not always easy and requires a well-thought-out marketing concept. At the beginning of an entrepreneurship, however, there is often insufficient budget to advertise in newspapers or other media. For this reason, direct marketing is very suitable as a marketing strategy .
What does direct marketing mean?
Direct marketing is an advertising measure in which you address your existing customers or your potential customers directly and personally. This means that you contact the customer by fax, letter, email or telephone. In rare cases, you may also visit people at home. A very important factor in direct marketing is that you always send a direct request to the customer and thus get them to respond. This is also known as the response element. This desired response in direct marketing can either be a call to assess customer satisfaction or an order. Do you get it from your existing customers or potential customers a feedback on your marketing measure, you can also derive the immediate and measurable success of this measure. Direct marketing is therefore also called dialogue marketing among experts.
What are the reasons for direct marketing?
In recent years, direct marketing has developed as one of the communication instruments that has become particularly important alongside online marketing, sponsoring and event marketing. There are certainly reasons for this, which are quite diverse. There are several factors that explain high growth rates in direct marketing.
- Consumers are overwhelmed with information, which leads to overload.
- When employees are deployed in the field, the costs increase more and more.
- Direct marketing has become interesting due to the development of innovative communication techniques.
- A dynamic market development arises from the increasing intensity of competition.
What is the aim of direct marketing?
For a founder, the most important objective in most cases is to acquire new customers . But if you want to continue to be successful in the market after founding, you need a high level of customer loyalty. This means that you have to look after your existing customers more intensively, improve customer proximity and thus increase customer loyalty. And this is exactly the second major goal of direct marketing.
- Direct marketing serves to attract customers.
- With direct marketing you increase the intensive care of your customers.
- With direct marketing you increase customer proximity and thus customer loyalty .
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, has become more and more important for providers of products or services in recent years. And with this development, the importance of direct marketing was rediscovered. This is also because the technology has not stood still in order to be able to better record customer data and their shopping behavior and preferences. This has made it much easier for you to address your customers in a much more individual and personalized way.
In direct marketing, the objective is not a direct purchase or contract. Rather, it is about designing all measures in such a way that you build a long-term relationship with the customer . The more intensively you do this, the more you can learn about the customer. By collecting this data, you are in the advantageous position of adapting your products or services individually to the customer.
Which manifestations are there?
In direct marketing, you can basically distinguish between three forms of appearance.
Passive direct marketing
When passive direct marketing , it is important that you make consumers aware of the offer, which you can offer as an entrepreneur. There is no direct contact with the customer . Neither through mailing campaigns, flyers, brochures or sales letters.
The reaction-oriented direct marketing
Your address gives the customer a direct opportunity to respond. This reaction is the initiation of a dialogue between you as the provider and the customer as the customer. You can achieve this form of direct marketing, for example, through advertising letters with an option to reply, through spots on TV or radio by showing or naming a telephone number. In the case of advertisements in magazines, there is also very often a reply coupon.
The interaction-oriented direct marketing
The third form of appearance is characterized by the fact that you, as the provider, enter into a direct and immediate dialogue with the customer as the customer. With this entry a mutual flow of information is initiated. For this, of course, personal and direct contact is necessary, for example through a phone call or a visit from a sales representative.
In all three forms of direct communication, you have to distinguish between different characteristics.
| features | Passive direct marketing | Response-oriented direct marketing | Interaction-oriented direct marketing |
| Reactance hazard | high | medium | small amount |
| Customer loyalty | high | medium | high |
| post processing | insignificant | medium | significant |
| individuality | small amount | medium | high |
| Response probability | small amount | medium | high |
| Suitable for database marketing | small amount | medium | high |
The sub-areas of direct marketing
Direct marketing is the umbrella term and includes some sub-forms. These sub-forms are called dialogue marketing, customer relationship management and direct mail.
- Dialogue marketing: With this form, you can already deduce the goal from the name. It’s about entering into a dialogue with a potential customer or an existing customer. The opportunities for interaction are significantly higher here than is the case with direct mail, for example. You explicitly encourage the customer to get in touch with you or your company. In order to implement dialogue marketing, however, in most cases you have to use high-quality advertising material or seek contact directly, for example by calling.
- Customer relationship management: Customer relationship management, also known as CRM for short, is referred to as looking after existing customers. In this case, you conduct your marketing with customer data that you have available. Your marketing primarily serves to increase customer loyalty. You can use the available data to divide your customer base into segments. Due to the work with data in conjunction with direct marketing, this is also referred to as database marketing.
- Direct mail: This term usually describes advertising that is kept simple. Here, personalized mailings or advertising letters are used.
