The Evolution of Direct Marketing
Much has changed in the nearly 140 years since Chicago entrepreneur Montgomery Ward sent out the first direct mail catalog in the United States. Ward’s vision defined an industry, but he couldn’t have imagined the challenges now faced by contemporary direct marketers.
Today, traditional direct mail campaigns often deliver anemic response rates of less than 1 percent, and direct mail campaigns sweetened with discounts don’t fare much better. Add a coupon to the message, and the response rate typically only rises to 1 percent. Meanwhile, mailing and printing costs continue to escalate. Businesses must clearly find more effective ways to get consumers’ attention.
In the digital age, consumers expect to receive meaningful marketing messages that reflect their individual interests and needs. Businesses must comply with this new expectation or risk being ignored. The challenge is to deliver relevant messages enhanced with incentive offers that add the kind of urgency and value needed to prompt action.
In light of that challenge, it’s clear that traditional direct mail marketing needs an update. Coupons and other discounts often fail to drive the consumer response that businesses need. Coupons expire in a matter of months—sometimes longer. There is no immediate need for consumers to redeem them, no call-to-action that drives an immediate purchase or response. In addition, coupon offers are often so generic that they lack relevance for today’s consumer who is accustomed to receiving targeted marketing messages.
If you could design the perfect direct marketing campaign, what would it do for you? Perhaps it would:
- Allow you to segment your campaign by providing different incentives specifically designed for each of those segments;
- Provide a powerful call-to-action that encourages recipients of the incentive to act on it right away;
- Allow you to track how each individual consumer redeems his or her incentive;
- Yield a response rate many times higher than you would expect from a typical coupon-based campaign.
Fortunately, there is a new kind of direct marketing tool that allows you to achieve each of these things.