Planning a direct marketing campaign

The search for new sales and customers should never stop. As part of your promotional marketing activity you may want to do a direct mail campaign. To get the most out of your direct marketing campaign here’s some of the fundamentals you need to incorporate into your plan:

Setting goals or objectives for your marketing campaign

As with all planning you need to be specific about what you want to achieve. Try and follow the SMART business planning rules by making your objectives Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time bound. For example, your objectives might be:

find 10 new customers
attract £5000 worth of orders
generate 500 enquiries
book 25 appointments
attract 5 new advertisers

Defining your target audience

First consider if you’re going to include existing customers in your campaign. If you are, will it be all of them? Or, for example, just those who have ordered from you in the last 6 months? Or maybe you want to communicate with those customers who haven’t ordered from you in the last 6 months?

If you’re a start-up business and don’t have many customers at the moment your initial research should give you a feel for the types of customers who are most likely to buy from you.

If you’re already in business you should have enough information to determine who your best customers are. Your best customers are probably those who:

buy regularly
have a higher than average total spend
are profitable for you
pay their bill on time
are easy and pleasant to deal with

Your aim should be to find some more of these ‘good’ customers. So once you’ve identified who they are you need to try and find things they have in common, such as:

size of business
number of employees and turnover (if you sell to businesses)
household income and socio-economic group (if you sell to consumers)
where they’re located
what industry they are in

Now you can think about buying marketing data to provide you with direct marketing leads that are as similar as possible to your best customers.

Buying data for your campaign

When you buy marketing data you usually have two options on how you can use it. You can either rent the business mailing list for a single direct marketing campaign, or you can lease the marketing data for a fixed period of time, say 12 months. Marketing mailing list providers will include a number of test or dummy mailing addresses to ensure you are only using the mailing list for the purpose you have agreed. If you use the marketing data for a different marketing promotion, or for longer than you have paid for, you will be liable to pay additional charges and could even have legal action taken against you.

Making sure you only buy marketing data that is fit for purpose

Before buying your promotional marketing data, find out:

what information the data contains
whether it’s been screened to remove people or organisations who have registered their details with the telephone, mailing or fax preference service.
find out more about the telephone preference service , corporate telephone preference service , mailing preference service and fax preference service
if telephone/fax or email addresses are included
how the information is collected
how often the data is updated
what’s the cost structure
how soon the data can be provided
what is the policy on non-deliverable messages or gone-aways?

Sales Plus Consultants Ltd is a supplier of accurate and reliable business mailing lists. Each of the site records of the 1.6 million companies in its database is updated and verified on a 24 week cycle. The database includes companies across 24 industry sectors and has up to 8 senior decision maker contacts per site.

FREE data count for Now Let’s Get Started visitors

Specify your data criteria and get a free data count that matches your criteria within 24 hours

Deciding how you’re going to use your marketing mailing list

Looking at your objectives, your target audience and what your budget will allow, you now need to decide what’s going to be most effective means of communicating with the people included in your marketing mailing list. The main choices for direct marketing campaigns are:

direct mail (ie postal delivery)
email
SMS
telephone
fax

You may find that combining two or more different direct marketing methods will bring you the best results. This integrated approach might involve a combination of a postal mailshot with a follow-up phone call, or an SMS message followed up by an email and then perhaps a postal mail shot.

Some advantages and disadvantages of direct mail

Direct mail is still an effective marketing communication that every business, even internet based businesses, should consider. Direct mail campaigns can have a big impact, especially if it’s particularly innovative, and can greatly increase engagement and interaction within your target customer group. However, there are some disadvantages of using direct mail in that it can be very expensive and you cannot accurately measure how many people have actually seen your campaign.

By comparison, the advantage of email or SMS marketing campaigns is that they are relatively cheap, they’re quick to plan and deliver, and with most email delivery services you have access to a range of statistics so you can measure who has read and interacted with your message.

The best time to send your marketing campaign

Think about your target customers and when their busy or quieter times are. If you try and communicate with them during their quieter periods you stand more chance of getting their attention. If you can time your communication just before their busy time you may make even more of an impact.

You may need to consider what month or even what day of the week you want people to receive your communication. If you’re planning an email or SMS campaign you can also choose what hour of the day your campaign is delivered.

It’s worth considering whether to get a regular steady stream of data, say on a monthly basis which can then be easily followed up, or whether to go for a bigger one-off campaign which will need more resource to implement and follow up.

Which ever delivery method you choose, factor in cost and time for:

selecting and buying the data
design
printing (for direct mail campaigns)
fulfilment services such as envelope stuffing or email/SMS setting up
the delivery costs eg postage, phone calls, or using a bulk email messaging service

Creating the right message

However you decide to send your message, whether it’s by post, email, SMS or phone, you only usually have a very small amount of time to make an impact. People will generally decide very quickly if they are going to pay any attention to you. To help grab people’s attention you should:

keep the message clear and simple
make your offer compelling. What is it your target customers will really love about doing business with you?
include an offer such as a discount or a promotional giveaway. For good quality promotional giveaways to suit all budgets try Shout Promotional Merchandise.
let people know what you want them to do next. This is known as a ‘call to action’, examples are ‘call our enquiries line today’, ‘send us an email’, ‘visit the shop’, ‘buy now’ and tell them how by clearly showing your contact details.

If you’re sending an email marketing campaign you must include an option for the recipient to opt-out of receiving future mailings from you. More information on the regulations when sending email marketing campaigns, including the rules on opting in and opting out.

Making it easy for people to respond to your campaign

You might want to consider getting a freephone number or a local call or dedicated phone number. As well as providing a good access method for your callers it may also help you measure the levels of activity the campaign generates.
Click for more information or to buy a business telephone number.

Make sure your teams are fully briefed about the campaign and know how to respond. If you are concerned about the volume of calls or that you do not have the right staff then consider using a professional telephone answering service to handle the calls and enquiries.

Measuring the results

Make sure you have a way to measure how successful the campaign is against your original objectives. You may need to include promotional codes or use specific phone numbers but make sure you have some way of recording the activity the campaign generates. Then you can measure the value of the new business you get from the campaign against the actual cost of the campaign. This is measuring your return on investment (ROI) sand will help you decide which promotional marketing activities are the most effective use of your time and money.

Related articles:

Understanding your customers – why they buy and how they buy

Regulations when selling by phone, including the rules on opting in and opting out

Regulations when sending email marketing campaigns, including the rules on opting in and opting out

Understanding the Data Protection Act