Five Pitfalls of Relevant Direct Marketing

Relevant Direct Marketing is the way marketing should be done! Some people call it personalized, some people call it customized. Below are five mistakes marketers make that make their marketing so irrelevant.

Relevant Messaging: Marketers who send the same message to all either are just plain lazy or have a product that is very unexciting. The best practice is to identify interests of your audience and send them personalized messages with relevant information.

Timing: The timing of most marketing campaigns is dictated by when the company is ready to send out a message and not by when the customer wants to buy. Not connecting to the customers when they are in their buying cycle results in missed sales opportunities. If you send out to 100 people, only 30 might actually be in the market to buy that product at that time. If you launch a new cool refrigerator, it does not mean that people are going to replace the fridge they just purchased 6 months ago. So it is important to figure out which customers are in the market and how to hit them with the right message at the right time. Use timing to your advantage and communicate when customers are most likely to buy. With offset printing and some other traditional methodologies, this approach just wasn't possible because you had to create these large scale printing jobs. Now with digital printing, you can send out 100 offers a day all based on incoming preferences that you've received from customers.

Response Mechanism: One of the biggest marketing pitfalls is not making your response channel relevant. Marketers will spend countless hours creating the right message and sending it out. And when somebody is interested in your product or offer then they call or go to the website to say “I'm interested in buying this.” But what do they find? The confusing jungle called your website where they can't find the product or the special offer. They talk to the call center where they are told “we don't know anything about it.” Or they go to the retail store and nobody there has an answer either. Even if five prospective buyers do not get a positive response then all the hard work has gone down the tubes. So when we think about marketing, we have to optimize the entire conversion pipeline.

Multichannel: Another mistake is focusing on only one channel or medium. Print is one medium, but there are a lot of other mediums that we have to use to get our message across. The Marketer or the enterprise does not care how you get the deal; all they want is to get the deal. They are not buying printing, they are buying sales. Get used to getting them the sales they want through any channel possible.

Testing: The value of direct marketing over brand marketing is that you can measure response. By testing your direct response advertising, you can help improve the response. By not testing, you just waste all that value.