Challenges encountered in Direct Marketing

Direct marketing has many benefits, if well planned and targeted the direct mail campaigns rise brand recognition and solicit more sales.

Direct marketing has many benefits, if well planned and targeted the direct mail campaigns rise brand recognition and solicit more sales. However, there are some few drawbacks in direct marketing to be considered prior to investing your resources into direct mail campaign namely, time and money in a direct mail campaign especially if you are a small business with a small to moderate marketing budget.

The designing of effective direct mail campaign can cost a lot especially if you engage the services of professionals such as photographers, copy writers, marketers, printers and graphic designers. The cost of producing fliers and brochures is high if quality printers are used; the quality of the direct mail content must be exemplary from the colors, graphics, paper or printing material and skills; good quality will attract valuable leads compared to poor quality materials. To attain the most effective direct mail marketing, the campaigns target the up-to-date mailing list lest you will waste your resources on dead leads. The relevant leads can be purchased from some of the list management companies or brokers, with the cost per unit reaching to over a hundred dollars which is very expensive. In some instances the first mailing list may not yielded the intended leads thus you will need to update it and this will cost more money.

For the direct mail used in direct marketing is unsolicited by the recipients, sometime they are viewed as spam thus offend the recipients. This makes the direct mail messages go unread as they are deleted immediately. In some serious cases the offended parties may seek for legal action on claim that they are being unnecessarily spammed. Such an action would attract the media making your business and its products be viewed in negative light; sales will slam down abruptly. The delivery of the direct mail sometimes causes emotional punishment to the people delivering them as they are humiliated by the targeted customers. The telemarketing services providers are insulted on the phone, or treated rudely thus can attest to these.

Due to the perception of the direct mail industry, the average success rate is below two percent and for the companies to recover the money invested on direct marketing thousands of messages must be sent out making it very cumbersome and costly.

In all direct mail campaigns, their timing is normally very crucial. In many cases it is very difficult to predict the leads time it will take to develop the best marketing campaign from conceptualization to implementation. This period is determined by the complexity of the components of the direct mail campaign such as the designs materials and the expertise needed.

The materials used in direct marketing have potential effect on the environment. The campaign must make effort to use recyclable materials which can be recycled later thus do not cause dumping on the environment. If non-environmentally friendly materials are used most of the leads will shun away from the products especially if they are environmentally conscious. The search for acceptable materials may cost more or increase the campaigns lead time.

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Jeff Mayor is the author of this article on direct mail.
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Author: M. Stewart.

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