If you’ve got a business, you probably know that autoresponders can automate a lot of what you do for follow up. However, this isn’t necessarily true in every situation. In that case, if you can, having actual people follow up for you can benefit your business greatly.
If someone joins your list and then takes whatever initial offering you give them, some may be satisfied with just an email that thinks them for their purchase or welcomes them to the list. However, many people will really enjoy getting a personal follow-up, from a live person. Doing so over the phone is one way to do it that can be easy to do and will give your customers personal service, too. Because, let’s face it; there’s never been a “frequently answered questions” section that could answer EVERY question customers have had.
If you call someone live (or you have someone do it for you), the customer can ask whatever he or she wants to and get an answer immediately. Today, we live in a world of immediate gratification, where “right now” is the norm. To beat competitors, you can do things faster and better — and right now — with some live calls. Do things right, and you’ll stand out.
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Direct marketing is a form of promotion encompassing many different media, including emails, direct mail, social networking sites, and faxes. This multimedia approach is meant to send targeted promotions to customers and/or businesses, and certain metrics are used to measure the effectiveness of a direct marketing mix’s divergent components.
Before reviewing the various methods of promotion used under the direct marketing umbrella, it is essential to talk about the analytics utilized to compute how effective certain marketing pieces are. Particularly speaking, the most commonly used marketing metrics used are the ROI, performance profit, and the hit rate. The ROI, or return on investment, is the revenue generated divided by the amount of money spent to distribute promotional pieces times 100. Overall, an ROI that is between three hundred and fifty and seven hundred tends to point towards a successful promotion. However, while a person many rationalize that very high ROIs indicate an excellent performance, ROIs that are too high may mean that a marketer isn’t maximizing the amount of revenue that he or she could potentially earn from a promotion. In other words, if he or she spent more money, then it would perhaps be possible to generate more even revenue than he or she already is. The hit rate is the number of marketing targets per thousand who are responding to a promotion, and the performance profit is the revenue minus whatever money was spent to send out a given promotion. Overall, the greater the hit rate and performance profit, the better.
Where the forms of media used by direct marketers are concerned, faxes, emails, social networking sites, and direct mail are some of the ones most commonly used by organizations. These will each be described in detail below.
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