DIRECT RESPONSE MARKETING

MAXIMUM MARKETING ROI: PROMOTING ONLY THOSE ALREADY PREDISPOSED TO BUY EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE SELLING

A particularly effective form of marketing- proven to drive sales volume over many decades- is called direct response (hereafter DR):

• Direct means bypassing any middlemen- including a sales team- and going directly at buyers.
• Response means you close by asking them to take an action, often immediately... which is usually "Buy Now!"

You are experiencing variations of direct response marketing every time you open your mail or email boxes and find offers to buy a variety of products or services. You are watching direct response advertising when you see commercials pitching a product or service and concluding with a phone number and strong push to buy now. Infomercials, certain webinars and a variety of other mediums all become DR creative when they cater to a targeted audience and encourage a specific & immediate action.

If done right, it is a timeless and effective way to sell products & services, leveraging a proven past AND present, high-performance track record... and confident expectations it will still yield well far into the future with prospects not even born yet. It sold your parents. It has worked on you. It will work on your children.

Most forms of marketing are much LESS direct, striving for "wide funnel" exposure, brand building, "awareness," etc. Similarly, much marketing acts as an action facilitator, trying to- for example- bring buyers and a sales team together where the latter can work towards closing sales. In such cases, marketing is not trying to directly sell something but set up more favorable conditions for sales to be made. For example, some marketing:

• is focused on only trying to build up a lead database.
• works on nurturing and bonding with prospects & leads.
• is entirely focused on "impresssions" or "eyeballs."
• only manages image and public perceptions.
• is about research.
• Etc. There are plenty of jobs in the marketing discipline that never directly close any sale. Instead, they play supporting roles in a broader sales process.

MUCH of the marketing function is NOT about closing sales but contributing to moving a selling process along. A sales team, department, process or function is generally charged with closing the deal.

DR is different. It is sometimes called direct response selling or direct response sales. It is a hybrid merger of pure marketing and pure sales disciplines, attempting to blend functions of each to do the complete jobs of BOTH, often in a relatively succinct and single pitch. It takes what could be a lengthy, multi-call sales cycle and compresses it into a concise pitch, aiming to go from first contact (attention) to close (action) in only minutes.

In a DR pitch, the marketing side stirs interest in total strangers, shares some information to grow desire, nurtures/bonds, etc. The sales side presents mainstream problems & solutions, proactively addresses typical objections, stirs emotion/enthusiasm and asks for the immediate sale, assumes some rejection, proactively repositions and asks for a sale again... often with some implied concepts of bargain and very limited time to get this special offer. More simply...

Direct Response rapidly works from total stranger to "Buy Now!" customer in only ONE advertisement.

It is generally a proactive form of marketing, meaning the seller is aggressively going after specific buyers rather than waiting for buyers to come to them. As such, it tends to be much more successful at directly driving sales volume than many other forms of advertising & marketing. Why? Because:

1. proactive means aggressively getting a marketing proposition in front of many people ASAP.
2. specific means that the market is a refined, narrowly-targeted group more likely to buy what is being pitched than making the very same pitch to the general public.

While much of marketing is about "greasing the wheels" of a sales model, THIS form of marketing IS selling because it (almost always) goes right for the money.

So why isn't ALL marketing DR marketing? In marketing & sales, there are no "one-size-fits-all" solutions or formulas. If there was, everything would be marketed that very same way without any variety. DR has its place in the marketer's toolbox. It is NOT the best fit for EVERY selling situation... only select ones where it can work very well. For the right situation...

Direct Response is a TERRIFIC way to cost-effectively sell high volumes of products or services FAST!

CRUCIAL VARIABLES IN SUCCESSFUL DR MARKETING

While there are many variables to doing DR right, here's 4 of the major ones...

1. Narrowly targeting prospects: a good amount of our DR work involves renting very specific lists of relevant prospects. There are multitudes of lists available in both the B2B and B2C spaces giving you the ability to easily put your offer in front of a very specific kind of potential buyer. Lists can be screened to narrow the target.
   
   For example, if you had a product suitable only for women, aged 25-40, with college degrees, health care occupations and living within 250 miles of a particular city(s), you can screen for all of that and much more. In doing so, you filter out the irrelevant (prospects that don't meet your ideal criteria) so that only ideal prospects are going to receive your offer.
   
   This is far superior to typical (buckshot) advertising- such as TV or Radio- where you must hope SOME of your target audience is watching or listening precisely when your ad happens to be running.

There's a great deal of cost savings when you can narrow marketing exposures... PLUS a sales lift when focused on a subset group most likely to buy.



2. Exceptional creative to pitch the product or service: DR creative must do MANY jobs. It has to establish you/your brand quickly, make your offering seem like a "must-have," build confidence in the prospect so they can trust your company, jack up perceived value so the subsequent offer appears to be a great bargain, etc. You are usually asking total strangers to be interested in your offering enough to open their wallets almost immediately after you first introduce your product or service to them. The creative is doing BOTH the marketing & sales functions in a matter of seconds to minutes. To succeed, it must be exceptional!
3. Call to action: the offer itself has a singular objective of moving the prospect to take action... right NOW! Often this is a call to "Buy Now!" via phone, Internet and/or mail. The offer will typically include multiple ways the prospect can respond and use a variety of shrewd tactics to motivate that response.
4. Tabulation of results: the crucial step of measuring how each piece of creative performs determines the effectiveness of the creative. This is not only about counting total dollars made but also relative comparisons of creative vs. creative, targeted list vs. list, etc.
   
   Along with the revenue from the campaign, many other important insights are realized and documented. The smart direct response marketer uses this knowledge to more effectively harvest additional revenue in subsequent campaigns.

INTELLIGENTLY EXECUTING DIRECT RESPONSE CAMPAIGNS

There is a great deal of nitty-gritty detail to doing DR campaigns right. For example, a crucial part of #1 is being very smart about how to minimize (marketing budget) risk. One piece of ideal execution is to apply statistical analysis using random samples of prospects from lists of prospects you can rent for promotional purposes. This sampling is used to cheaply determine which lists have tangible ROI so they can be deemed worthy of a "roll."

You roll to lists in their entirety only when they prove themselves to be profitable. You get that proof via statistical work on small random samples of much bigger lists.

Instead of risking a LOT of money to promote ALL of the prospects in every apparently-favorable list, we can use the science side of marketing to confidently project the strength (ROI) of whole lists by testing those small samplings. More simply: the risks of dud lists is cut down to smallish sample sizes instead of paying for entire lists to see if they profitably yield.

This is a popular penny-pinching tactic that minimizes risk while maximizing discoveries of new sources of buyers. Done well, you spend a fraction of the cost as opposed to promoting ALL individuals in ALL lists in hopes of ending up with a profitable result. You/We are not guessing about whether each list is good (profitable) or bad (not profitable). The samples objectively reveal that crucial information to us and we act (spend) accordingly. Never risk big chunks of your marketing budget on hope & luck...

Use marketing science to maximize ROI!

List rentals can involve any number of lists, from a single list to thousands of lists. They offer almost any number of prospects- from a small quantity of potential buyers to millions- at various rental rates-per-name: often a few cents per name to 30-70 cents or more.

List brokers usually have some minimum quantities to make the list rental transaction worthwhile. No one has much interest in renting someone a list of 50 names at 25 cents per name for a total list rental cost of $12.50. List rental minimums are usually 1K to 15K or more names depending on the list:

• If you are quoted a list with a 5K minimum rental quantity at 20 cents per name, renting that minimum of 5K names is going to cost $1K.
• A 10-list campaign in which all of the lists happen to share that same minimum & rental rate would cost $10K to promote those 50K names (10 lists of 5K names each).
• A 100-list campaign with that same minimum & rental rate would cost $100K to promote 500K names.

Again, all relevant lists could rent for a wide variety of cost-per-name and minimum quantities. If you are interested in getting specifics for your own business, contact us for a FREE CONSULTATION and we can identify cost & minimum specifics for relevant lists of likely buyers of your own products and/or services.

Want to learn more? The next page covers:

1. an example of how to cost-efficiently market millions of relevant buyers,
2. how to leverage the same marketing budget to fund multiple campaigns,
3. how to refine a DR marketing model and
4. how we can help you do it all right.

Interested? Click the NEXT button to continue...