If I was to spend this article talking only about Consecotaleophobia I’d probably lose your interest. After all, you’re reading this to help you be the best businessperson you can be … not to find a cure for your acute fear of chopsticks!

Direct Marketing (DM), is a little like that. It’s about thoroughly defining your target market, speaking to them appropriately and measuring their response. It can be a highly cost effective way of increasing sales from new and current customers. It’s also a very personal type of communication and is often called “one to one” marketing.

At its core, direct marketing is about going straight to the individual, rather than trying to reach them through third-party mediums like billboards or newspapers. At its best, it can ramp up leads immediately…at its worst, it’s called junkmail!

So, why should you do it, how do you do it and how do you do it well?

To DM or not to DM
When you buy a radio ad, it’s heard by a wide range of people and you pay for that privilege. But what if you only wanted to reach a niche segment of the population? Perhaps families living in city apartments, or nurses in regional areas or male drivers of hybrid vehicles? This is where DM comes to the fore. It enables you to tailor the right message to the right people. It comes at a higher cost per head, but your investment will have less wastage. You’ll also be able to start building a relationship with your customers and tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns.

To show you how a campaign can be structured, let’s use the real example of Australian Financial Solutions (or Austfinance), a company providing commercial property and construction development finance.

Define your target market
What type of customer is your most profitable? What type of new customers do you want to attract?
Austfinance’s target market are property developers. Drilling down, Austfinance were specifically trying to reach developers finding it difficult to get projects off the ground due to traditional banking restrictions.

Research their hot buttons
Crack their code! What are their current issues and how can you address for them?
In Austfinance’s case, they did their research, discovering their target market was hamstrung by the need to get pre-sales on their projects as a pre-requisite to securing funding.

Write so they’ll listen
Write the DM piece so it ‘speaks into their listening’. Hit that hot button immediately. Answer their current need or desire. It’s also a great idea to include testimonials or case studies, as these types of examples can really drive your point home.
Austfinance ran with bold headings: “Inside…the faster way to get funded…now!”. And the rear of the mailer was just as strong with bold type declaring “Accelerate your project today with faster funding…and end the pre-sales stall.” The hot buttons were well and truly addressed, they also included case studies showcasing a variety of developments they’d assisted.

Grab me!
Capture their attention in the first few seconds, grabbing their interest so they’ll read on. It’s all about having a powerful creative execution, one that demands attention and will entice people to open it. Here you need to think about not only the artwork, but also the way you’ll be sending it…a letter, catalogue, email, postcard, interestingly shaped flyer?
For their DM piece, Austfinance chose a brightly coloured, 3-fold envelope-sized mailer.  It was addressed with the correct contact details of the right person at each organisation, and as their target was practically 100% male, they used racing car imagery.

Finish off with a call to action!
You then need to keep your entire DM piece humming. Keep it interesting, carrying your readers with you right through to the end where you have your irresistible call to action. It’s vital that you offer your customers a variety of ways to find out more, whether it’s a phone number, email address or web details. And these days, more so than ever, you need to make sure that your website is fabulous.

Be a bloodhound
Bloodhounds are renowned for their tracking ability, and to be able to plan your marketing strategies going forward you too need to be diligent about tracking. Ask every incoming lead where they heard about you, make a note of it. You can then piece together vital information eg: on the surface of it, 80 leads coming from a newspaper ad might seem pretty great, but if you were only able to convert 2 of them to sales, it pales in comparison to 40 leads from a DM piece with 15 conversions!