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Direct marketing delivers your marketing message directly to a group consumers or businesses. It’s a form of promotion and advertising that provides the recipient with a direct call to action. The direct marketing list you usetypes of direct marketing lists can make or break your direct marketing efforts, so it’s important to educate yourself. The following are the three main types of direct marketing.

Mailing Lists

Direct mail is one of the most familiar forms of direct marketing. Businesses advertise their products and services using a mail piece. Direct mail campaigns provide your prospects with a tangible mail piece to read at their leisure without being distracted by competing advertising. Direct mail campaigns are extremely effective and have a very good response rates when they are personalized and customized to a specific target audience.

Types of direct mail

The most common types of direct mail include:

  • brochures – multi-page promotions of products or services
  • envelope mailers – a promotional letter within an envelope
  • postcards – a simple promotional message intended mailing without an envelope

Telemarketing Lists

Telemarketing is the process of calling prospects on the phone to promote your products or services. This can be done using your own sales staff or by subcontracting a call center. The size of your telemarketing list should be determined by the number of people making the calls. If you only have 1 person making the calls, you don’t want the data to go bad before they are able to call all the contacts on the list. Conversely, if you have 10 telemarketers making the calls you want to make sure the telemarketing list is large enough.

Telemarketing is personal and interactive, and capable of providing an immediate response. As effective as telemarketing is, you need to be sensitive to your prospects’ tolerance and responsiveness. Not everyone likes getting unsolicited phone calls.

Telemarketing campaigns work best when the telemarketing lists are highly targeted, with accurate data that matches your current customer’s profiles.

Types of Telemarketing

Types of telemarketing include:

  • cold-calling – calling someone for the first time to generate a new sale
  • follow-ups – a call made to follow-up on a previous call, renew contact with an old customer, thank an existing customer for their business or to check on customer satisfaction
  • fundraising calls – contact made for the purpose of asking for charitable donations
  • market research – calls to demographic segments to get information for research surveys
  • database clean up – calls made to update customer records

Email Lists

Email marketing is an effective way of reaching out to new prospects or following up with existing customers. Email marketing is extremely versatile, and you can easily customize your marketing messages to various market segments, or for prospects in different stages of the sales funnel.

Email marketing can be used to nurture customer relationships, provide company and product information, drive website traffic and to promote direct sales. The emails can be as elaborate or as simple as needed.

The majority of people check their emails daily, making email a powerful marketing tool for your business. However, email marketing should be used responsibly, and it is extremely important to have your customers’ consent before sending emails.

Types of Email Marketing

Email marketing strategies include:

  • e-newsletters – to provide business updates and introduce new products or services
  • promotional emails – to generate new leads or to provide an offer to existing customers
  • follow-ups – to follow-up on a previous email, renew contact with a old customer thank a customer for their business or to check on customer satisfaction

 The most successful direct marketing campaign will use a mix of marketing methods. Repetition is very important in any type of marketing efforts. The more you can get yourself out in front of prospects, the greater the chance of being remembered. Try a direct mail campaign with a telemarketing follow-up or an email blast in conjunction with a direct mail campaign. A Multi-Channel campaign also allows your prospects multiple ways to communicate back to you.

Know your responsibilities.

Before undertaking any direct marketing campaign, you need to understand the regulations legislating each method of communication. The onus is on you to make sure you are in compliance. Legitimate list brokers and managers should be able to confirm that the lists they are providing comply to the various rules and regulations. If in doubt, ask.