Direct Response Marketing: A Complete Guide
Recent reports have revealed that marketing emails that contain a single call-to-action saw 371% more clicks and 1617% more sales. Still, a shocking 70% of businesses aren’t including these valuable CTAs in their digital approach. If you’re one of these businesses, today is your lucky day. From building your sales to driving traffic to your website, events, and more, direct response marketing is a technique you simply can’t afford to miss out on.
That’s why we’re here to walk you through it in this simple and complete direct response marketing guide. Follow along to discover the direct response marketing benefits, tips, and strategies you need to know to master this marketing approach and skyrocket your business success.
What is Direct Response Marketing
First things first, let’s get to the bottom of what this highly beneficial approach really is.
Direct response marketing is much like having a conversation with your audience. Instead of traditional brand advertising which presents more like a monologue to your customers, direct response encourages a two-way interaction by encouraging your audience to take action.
This simple call-to-action formula serves to take your customers right from interest to sale without the relationship-building steps that techniques like social media marketing and lead nurturing take. Instead, the process is put into high gear to turn out impressive results, fast.
So where do you use direct response marketing, you ask? Actually, nearly anywhere!
From tv advertisements to human billboards to your social media posts and ads, direct response marketing can be seamlessly integrated into your traditional marketing approach to skyrocket results.
Direct Response Marketing Benefits
Just from the definition of this marketing technique, you can already get a feel for how advantageous this approach can be. While we would never suggest dropping your long-term relationship-building strategies, here are the direct response marketing advantages you can expect to see.
Fast Results
As we mentioned above, the purpose of direct response marketing is to take your audience from impression to sale in one fell swoop. By promoting them to take action and making that action easy and accessible, you’ll be able to see results almost instantaneously.
While a quick sale is not the only method to success, it can be incredibly helpful when promoting events on a short timeline or boosting sales before the end of the quarter.
In addition to this, you’ll now have an in for relationship-building efforts going forward. As long as your business is as great as you’ve let your customer believe, you’ll be able to earn loyal, long-lasting customers.
Great ROI
One of our favorite direct response marketing advantages is the low-investment, high-reward structure.
Instead of paying for impressions to build your brand awareness, you’ll be launching campaigns that drive revenue-related results.
Let’s look at an example of how this works. Your brand publishes a brand awareness post with a one-sided conversation. You’re telling the consumer who you are, what you sell, or offering them some free information. Great! This is a fantastic form of brand advertising.
With a direct response marketing approach, this post presents an irresistible offer and a way to take advantage right then and there. Instead of leveraging your customer’s trust in your brand later on, this method puts a sense of urgency on following through in the moment.
This can stop customers from ‘forgetting’ about your brand or finding a company with a better offer before you have a chance to reel them in.
Lead Generation
Think sales are the only benefit of direct response marketing? Think again.
Because your approach encourages action, you can easily and effectively take the information you gain (such as their email address or phone number) and leverage it for future marketing efforts.
This means that even if a consumer doesn’t make a purchase or take you up on your outstanding offer, you’ll have a chance to reach out to them again.
Direct Lines of Communication
Along the same lines as lead generation, you’ll also now have a direct path to communicate with that interested consumer.
Instead of a passing connection on social media or other platforms, you’ll now have a tangible means of reaching your customer to follow up, send another offer, or market to in the future.
You’ll also already know what this consumer is interested in and can tailor your future communication to suit their needs and draw in their business.
Easy to Track and Measure
Finally, direct response marketing is simple and effective to track and measure.
Because the results happen so fast, you’ll have insight into what’s working for your brand in record time. You can then use these key metrics to guide your future campaigns with data-driven adjustments.
This information is also much more accurate than what you may take in from a brand advertisement. This is because direct action produces trackable and traceable results whereas impressions and brand awareness are much harder to measure.
Direct Response Marketing Tips
Now that you know how your business can benefit from direct response marketing, we’re willing to bet you’re itching to get started.
Here are some simple steps and time-saving tips to get you on your way to success.
1. Target Specific Audiences
Just like your other advertising efforts, you’ll want to be intentional with who you target.
Your direct response campaigns will rely on consumers that are highly interested in what you have to offer. This means you’ll need to spend some time and energy discovering who this audience is and where to find them.
Instead of pumping these CTAs out to your entire reach, be strategic about who you offer these deals to for undeniable impact.
2. Keep it Simple, Clear, and Compelling
As you write the copy for your direct marketing response efforts, be sure to keep it simple and easy to understand. The worst mistake businesses make with this approach is trying to fit too much information into a great offer.
Instead of distracting your audience with fluff and extras, get to the point- and fast.
Your message should be clear without any confusing or misleading details. Your goal is to make them want more, then give them a way to get it!
3. Create a Sense of Urgency
Having a great offer is one thing, but getting people to commit to your offer on the spot will require a bit of pressure. This is called creating a sense of urgency.
Your consumers need to believe that if they don’t take action now, they’ll miss out.
This can be done by putting a timeline on the offer or expressing the exclusiveness of it by limiting the number of consumers who can take advantage. Whatever you choose, be sure to make it impossible to pass up.
4. Include an Irresistible CTA
On that note, your CTA needs to be easy, fast, and irresistible.
To ensure your offer is clear, you should only ever have one CTA in each campaign. If you’re asking your audience to do multiple things, they’ll become confused and likely uninterested.
Make your action call specific and use enticing language to encourage consumers to click that button, attend that event, or purchase that item, fast!
5. Provide the Means to Respond
Once you’ve asked your consumers to take action, you’ll need to make taking that action as easy and accessible as possible.
If you’re using this method in your advertising efforts, the best way to encourage follow-through is to customize your CTA button accordingly. Ideally, you want to get them from point A to B with as little work and navigation as possible.
If the process is too complicated, you may lose them along the way. You want to ensure that these leads feel they can trust you by giving them exactly what they need without taking too much back. For example, asking for too much personal information can be a turn-off. Instead, only gather the essentials to encourage better buy-in.
6. Track and Measure
Finally, it’s time to track and measure your success.
Take note of your click-through rates, measure sales, and observe how your consumers interacted with your offer. Did a lot of customers submit their info but never made a purchase? Perhaps you noticed a higher click-through rate with one offer over another.
All of these insights will help you tailor your direct response marketing efforts towards your unique customer base to drive results. The more information you can gather, the better your chances of improving your approach for the next campaign.
Your Direct Response Marketing Guide for Success
Now that you know the ins and outs of direct response marketing, it’s time to put your knowledge to the test. From the amazing benefits to key elements to include in your strategy, we’re confident you’ll see impressive results with this direct response marketing guide.
Ready to launch your new approach but not sure where to start? Get in touch with us today to discover how we can customize your direct response marketing strategy to skyrocket your brand’s marketing success.
