What is Direct Response Marketing?
Advantages of Direct Response Marketing
Key Components of Direct Response Marketing
Benefits of Direct Response Advertising
Examples of Excellent Direct Response Marketing
Closing Thoughts
What is Direct Response Marketing?
Direct response marketing is a technique employed to trigger immediate response to a particular campaign or element of a website. It’s most seen through limited time offers, if you buy a certain product in the next 2 hours, you get a 10% discount/free shipping. Otherwise, the promotion expires and the product returns to its normal conditions. This type of marketing is specifically done to pressure customers into buying a product or service, creating a sense of urgency. People targeted by direct response marketing (also called “direct mail”) spend as much as 28% more, according to a USPS study. These techniques can also be employed through physical mail, email, and even ads placed on ad-reserved spaces.
Advantages of Direct Response Marketing
Customers targeted by direct response marketing campaigns spend 28% more, and they really should, since the response rate is between 10 and 30 times higher than digital strategies. Despite popular belief, millennials, too, respond well to direct mail marketing. An Inkit research places direct response marketing as having 37% of a response rate, compared to 0.6% for email. Direct response allows for more specific targeting, sending different messages to customers based off of their demographic or buying behavior. Email marketing is also a cheaper technique, albeit it also presents a reduced response rate.
Key Components of Direct Response Marketing
A Personalized Offer
Customers are special, and you need to make sure they feel like it. Merely labelling an offer as a “special offer” already has a huge impact in the client’s psyche, and it directly influences their decision to purchase. When you treat every individual client as the most important person for your brand, the business takes care of itself. This is also valid for special return and refund policies, especially when selling products promising to reinvent the market. Sometimes, offering a full refund if the customer doesn’t like the product after a test period (usually from 15 to 30 days), makes all the difference. The best marketing comes from satisfied customers.
Clear and Compelling Content
The strategy is called “direct response marketing” for a reason: it’s straight to the point. Offer, call to action, end. But besides being direct, it needs to be crystal clear. Customers shouldn’t need to need more than three lines to find out what you are selling. Moreover, every line of text needs to lure them in: engaging the reader and convincing them even further to purchase your product. Often, lengthy marketing campaigns end nowhere. People are reading less and that means you only have a short text to convince your reader to become a client.
A Sense of Urgency
The entire purpose of direct response marketing is persuading potential clients into making urgent, often impulsive, choices. The wording of your text-based outreach really matters in this aspect. You need to make sure customers engage with your brand or even purchase your product on the spot – otherwise, it may run out of stock or the special discount will end.
An Irresistible CTA
CTA stands for “Call to Action” – the next step you want your potential customer to take. These often come with imperative verbs: “redeem yours now”, “click here”, and “learn more”. Marketing is all based on AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Attention and Interest often last mere seconds, and that’s where your CTA helps. It grabs potential clients’ attention, gets them interested, makes them want to take action, and then they take it. That’s why you need to make sure it is always in its best shape – it’s often the only thing between a complete sale and an incomplete one.
Benefits of Direct Response Advertising
Generating Immediate ROI
ROI stands for “Return Over Investment” – how much is being profited after spending money to bring customers in. Due to the various forms direct response marketing can take, it’s often possible to see statistics for ROI immediately: say you spent $100 to send 20,000 marketing emails, and the product offered costs $50 dollars. If 200 people (just 1% of the total of emails sent) purchase your product, you have already profited 1000% of your original investment. This calculation is easily done by our experts and algorithms, here at FrescoData.
Trackable Performance
At FrescoData, we prioritize fast results. That’s why our team of professionals developed several algorithms and strategies to leave all needed information available to you. Direct response marketing is easily trackable: emails/direct mail is sent out and, based off of profits, our algorithms calculate how effective the marketing campaign is. They also suggest what marketing strategies are more effective, traces a trustworthy audience profile, and even suggests ads that can be used.
Targeting Specific Audiences
In the digital world, targeting specific audiences is easy. The algorithms, here at FrescoData, harness all needed demographics about people – and you can easily see the ones that best fit your audience. Demographics such as medium income, age, gender, education, location, and even assets’ value are created, as are the physical addresses and email addresses of these people. Once that’s done, all it takes is a command to send out emails to your entire desired demographic.
Examples of Excellent Direct Response Marketing
Referral Program
A referral program is often called a “word-of-mouth” program – using your clients to bring your business more clients. The original customers are rewarded, of course, whether with discounts, special benefits, or even real cash. It’s often one of the easiest, most inexpensive marketing campaigns one can use. This Extole research actually shows it’s one of the most believed campaigns, not to mention one with a higher retention rate, not to mention they’re four times more likely to complete a purchase. This, of course, is due to a world in which people are more and more bombarded with ads everyday: purchasing something that an acquaintance approves of makes them feel safer about it.
Upselling
Upselling is, basically, inciting your clients to buy other (usually more expensive) products that have to do with the one they’ve shown interest in. Upselling increases profits by 10 to 30 percent on average, according to this study created by Sumo. The same research also points out that between 70 and 95% of revenue comes from the same tactic, which also does happen to be one of the most cost-effective ones – they are 68% more affordable than getting a new customer.
Social Media Ads
Everyone uses social media, even if just used for work (think networks like LinkedIn). So, why not use the ad spaces available in them for profit? Most social networks have a profile all traced out – they know the user’s name, location, age, education, interests, and even places of employment. The algorithms at FrescoData make this work even easier: through our many partnerships, we’re able to target your desired audience in whichever websites they go, social media or not. This allows for more relevant ads to be shown, which, in return, boosts your profits.
Contests or Giveaways
Everybody likes giveaways, even if the chance of winning is 1 in 10,000. Through contests and giveaways, not only does your brand appeal more to the customer, by wanting to give them something, but it’s also great to generate traffic in your page – and earn followers along the way, too. Social media algorithms are created to boost trending pages. A contest is a sure way to get hundreds (or even hundreds of thousands) of people to interact with your page, increasing your visibility. Likewise, one of the requirements to join the contest/giveaway can be following your page, and earning lots of visibility from that alone.
Text Messaging
Whether you prefer WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or even your phone’s ordinary SMS service, one thing is for sure: people text all the time. Whether it’s their coworkers, friends, or even their boss. Text messaging’s omnipresence in modern life has given it a lot of potential as a marketing strategy. It’s as targetable as any other strategy, of course, and offers customers the possibility of remaining on your messaging list, or being removed from it. It’s also a great way to stay in touch with your audience, by sending them personalized messages with surveys or special offers.
Chatbots and Social Media Messaging
Chatbots are present in most social networks these days. They’re basically customer service automated bots. If customers want to see the product catalogue, they’re sending it their way. If they need to talk to a real human, likewise. Rule is: if the bot can do it, let it. It’s more cost-efficient, saves spending with personnel, and makes it easier for social media users to sort all their doubts in the very same platform they saw the original ad in.
Google Ads
Google is used about 2 trillion times per year. It’s one of the most effective marketing tools available in the market today – putting your ad in Google not only means a vast audience will be seeing your ads, but also that many of them will “convert” (purchase). Google’s algorithm will show your ads when keywords related to your brand or product are searched for, optimizing the search, showing relevant ads to potential clients, and keeping your brand in the spotlight.
Direct Response Marketing for Job Recruiting
Direct response is also very useful for job recruiting, especially in fields which lack talent, need speedy hiring, and little people apply to. Benefits for applying also tend to be attractive, such as sums of money, health insurance, defined career path, or possibility to become a permanent employee of the company.
Closing Thoughts
Direct response marketing is often tricky, depending on your preferred platform and strategy. However, at FrescoData, we count on our several professionals, associates, and algorithms to find the perfect strategy for your brand. We’ve got you covered from campaign ideas to the result of your investment. And a huge part of it comes from our software algorithms, specifically programmed to cover marketing campaign needs. Our algorithms can also suggest ads, target incredibly specific demographics, suggest more effective marketing campaigns, keep detailed statistics for each asset and tool used, and much more. Our company also possesses the ISO 27001 certification for data security, meaning everyone is safe in our processes: you, your brand, and your clients.
