Launching a brand is not easy. You’ve worked to optimize your site experience, build a solid content marketing strategy, allocate budget for paid search and launch social media ads.
Things are working; site traffic is good, phones are ringing, orders are being placed, and sales are growing. But despite all the progress over the past year, you’re challenged to do more – and faster.
Sound familiar?
When challenged to grow the business at a greater rate, many growth marketers decide to crank up the dial on their digital efforts. But eventually, the spend and performance hits a point of diminishing returns. So what’s next? That’s when growth marketers need to seriously consider tried and true direct marketing channels – like mail and email.
Want to know the four big reasons D2C brands with big growth ambitions can’t afford to ignore direct marketing?
#1 – Direct Marketing is Reliable
When you plan a direct marketing campaign, you can have confidence that it’s going to reach the intended prospect. This is two fold. First, because you have the exact contact information for the recipient (address or email) and not an anonymized, derivative connection grouped with hundreds or thousands of other anonymized IDs. Second, tracking and fulfillment of individual marketing communications are definite; you know which messages were sent to which targets and at what frequency. Delivery is a crucial element of any marketing campaign and with direct marketing, you can be sure that your message is going to get delivered.
#2 – Direct Marketing is Scalable
Most social and digital campaigns are either mass market, targeting broader swaths of the population or subject to “black box” modeling from the DSP. The result is either having your ad served to the wrong target OR not enough ads served to the right target. With direct marketing, you have control over the number of impressions served to each prospect, plus there is significantly less drop-off when trying to message your ideal customer. This is because address, phone and email are primary elements with which all other data within the identity graph links. Scale is obtainable because you can contact everyone at an optimal frequency and NOT just those that are users of a specific app or social network.
#3 – Direct Marketing is Measurable
Having the ability to target individuals on a one-to-one basis means that you can measure performance on a one-to-one basis as well. Unique links, barcodes and promo codes ensure that the connection to response and conversion are tied back to the original acquisition campaign. Capturing address detail as the customer migrates down funnel is another way to connect back to the campaign. For example, did you mail that address or send that email address a marketing communication recently? If yes, there’s likely some information that can be attributed back to the campaign.
#4 – Direct Marketing is Effective
Before the direct marketing campaign is deployed, you know how much it is going to cost. Based upon prior campaigns and testing, you also know what the likely response and engagement rates will be. These key details will give you the ability to build out a cost / benefit analysis to ensure success. By managing cost and anticipated return you can ensure that your campaign will achieve the intended goal prior to execution.
The next time you’re in the board room or a Zoom call and your boss asks how you plan to grow the business faster, you’ll be able to respond, “Direct Marketing”. Prepared with the rationale outlined above as well as an ask for investment dollars you’ll be well on your way to deliver performance.
What reason do you have not to?
