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Direct marketing is a form of promotion encompassing many different media, including emails, direct mail, social networking sites, and faxes. This multimedia approach is meant to send targeted promotions to customers and/or businesses, and certain metrics are used to measure the effectiveness of a direct marketing mix’s divergent components.
Before discussing the different forms of media used under direct marketing, it is important to discuss the analytical tools used to measure the effectiveness of marketing promotions. In particular, there is the ROI (or return on investment), performance profit, and hit rate. The ROI is the revenue over expenses incurred to send out the promotion times one hundred. Generally speaking, ROI’s between 350 and 700 indicate a solid performance. While one may think that the higher the ROI is the better, ROIs that are too high may indicate that a marketer is not spending enough money and could make more money if he or she spends more money. Hit rate is the number of people per thousand pieces of promotional material that were sent out who responded to the promotion. Last but not least, the performance profit is the revenue minus the expenses associated with a promotion. The higher the hit rate and performance profit for a given promotion, the better.
Where the forms of media used by direct marketers are concerned, faxes, emails, social networking sites, and direct mail are some of the ones most commonly used by organizations. These will each be described in detail below.
Email promotions are rather popular direct forms of marketing. The advantages to sending out emails include that they are relatively inexpensive, can be sent out quickly, can be very targeted, and can reach many people in a short amount of time. Disadvantages include that it is easy for a company’s emails to get lost in the mix as so many companies already sent out e-promotions, there is the risk of the emails going into peoples’ spam folders, and opt-in laws may severely restrict the amount of targeted email names that a marketer could get for a given promotion.
Direct mail is the oldest method of direct marketing. It comes in the form of brochures, catalogues, postcards, letters, pamphlets, booklets, and more. For years, direct mail had always been one of the most prevalent forms of promotion in existence. However, it is also among the most costly types of marketing. Printing, mailing, postage, list, and fulfillment costs all have to be taken account with direct mail, and increased postage rates in the past few years have not helped much. While direct mail still has its place in the marketing spectrum, many companies have lessened the amount of direct mail sent out and increased the amount of electronic promotions distributed at the same time in an effort to reduce costs. While cost is a factor where direct mail is concerned, it has its benefits namely in that some of the most personalized promotions are mail pieces, and mail stands out in a digital world.
In very recent years, social networking sites have become increasingly popular marketing tools that allow companies to directly market products and services to consumers. Companies and individuals can set up targeted pages on these sites, and friends and friends of friends of the companies can join the pages. The urls of the pages on the social networking sites can be embedded in email promotions. Furthermore, very targeted ads can be placed on pages within these sites, which provide an attractive pool of millions of new leads.
Over the past few years, social networking websites have been widely used marketing tools that allow firms to direct promote services and products to customers. Businesses and individual people can start targeted pages within these websites, and fans can join these specific pages. The links of the pages on these social network websites can be placed on companies’ emails, and businesses can buy ads that are shown to very targeted demographic groups as well on these sites, which provide firms with a solid source of new targets numbering in the millions.
In conclusion, direct marketing encompasses a variety of media and is measured by ROI, performance profit, and hit rate. The different forms of this type of marketing include emails, direct mail, social networking sites, and faxes.
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source to this post: The Field Of Direct Marketing: A Summary
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