Why Your Client Should Use a Direct Marketing Campaign

BY Rachel Cagle
Featured image for “Why Your Client Should Use a Direct Marketing Campaign”

COVID resulted in many changes in the way consumers perceive advertisements. It was a rough period on people’s wallets, and just when we started to get past the height of the pandemic, a recession began looming. So, what consumers want and need from ads right now for them to be effective is value. That doesn’t just mean savings (although, who doesn’t like a bargain?). Ad messaging needs to be valuable to them to cut through the clutter. A direct marketing campaign can help your client with that.

Why Your Client Should Use a Direct Marketing Campaign

Why Direct Marketing?

Generalized ads that are made for your client’s target audience as a whole are useful for getting information to the public. However, targeted messaging is what really gets consumers to pay attention to ads. A direct marketing campaign focuses on getting personalized ads to each recipient to ensure each outreach attempt features information that will be of value to each consumer. “Hey, everyone; we have this thing!” is good, but, “Hey, Rachel, remember this thing you were looking at? It’s on sale,” is even more effective. That’s the beauty of direct marketing.

Direct Mail

At this point, it’s no secret that direct mail ads are a quality addition to any ad campaign. The even better news is that not all that many marketers are acting on this news yet. According to research from Winterberry Group, direct mail volumes only increased by 1% between 2021 and 2022. In 2019, direct mail volumes plummeted by 14.4% and have only increased by 4.6% since 2020. This means that your client can add direct mail to their media mix and not have to compete with too many competitors for recipients’ attention.

In fact, marketing spend for most of the ads that end up in consumers’ mailboxes hasn’t experienced such growth:

  • Direct Mail: The increase in ad spending is comparable to the volume increase (1.6%) for a total of $41.7 billion
  • Magazines: Ad spending fell by 9.1% in 2022, bringing magazine marketing spend to $6.8 billion
  • Newspaper: Newspaper marketing spend also took a hard hit in 2022 with a 5.6% decreasing in marketing spend, bringing it to a total of $6.6 billion

Not only is direct mail spending low, the prices of many digital advertisements are increasing. According to Winterberry Group, popular ad types such as Meta’s CPM, TikTok CPM, Google’s programmatic display and Instagram’s CPMs are all rising rapidly.

So, it’s time for your client to strike while the competition (and relative price) is low and add direct mail to their next direct marketing campaign.

Email

Email ads are an old reliable for brands wanting to get messages of value to their current and potential customers. That’s probably why, according to Winterberry Group, email/​SMS marketing spend increased by 5.7% last year. However, U.S. spending on data, identity, data services, and platforms for email fell by 4% in 2022. So, there’s a good chance that personalizing your clients email ad outreach will give them a leg up on the competition in their next direct marketing campaign.

SMS

SMS ads are another great addition to direct marketing ads because people ALWAYS look at the texts they get. And they only sign up for SMS ads from brands that they’re really interested in getting ads from. Sending a quick notification of a promotion your client is running is a great way to get the information into the minds of people who are likely to use it.

What Media Types Should Your Client Use?

Not all media types are created equal for each audience. To figure out which media types to include in your client’s next direct marketing campaign, check out their target audience’s profile on AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel. There, you can see which ad media types your client’s target audience took action after receiving, seeing or hearing within the last year.

Photo by Magnet​.me

 


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