While inbound marketing strategies and content marketing have become the cream of the crop lately, there is still a place for direct marketing in any business.
Direct marketing campaigns are still one of the most efficient ways to communicate important messages to your audience. As such, it’s never a bad idea to think about new ways to increase the ROI of your direct marketing efforts.
Whether you’re a small business or a mid-sized company looking to reach the next level in your development, here are four surefire ways to improve your direct marketing campaigns.
Start using A/B testing
AB testing is one of the best ways to test how the decisions you’re making play a role in customer behavior. By offering users two different options, you can begin to measure how button placement, anchor text, color, and more play a role in influencing how a customer engages with your business. You can A/B test anything from an email newsletter to the design of your website.
Many platforms even offer you the ability to offer two separate versions of the same content to test on smaller portions of your audience. Then you can distribute the more popular version to a wider list based on how each campaign performs. This approach to direct marketing ensures that your emails have maximum impact by drawing on the way your existing audience engages with them.
The result is a much higher ROI for your communications, which can be a boon for any business.
Analyze your data
Oftentimes as a business owner, you may feel like you’re making decisions in a vacuum, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Harnessing customer data is one way to do that, since it can help you learn more about the areas where your business is meeting your customer’s needs and where you could improve.
Recognizing specific sales trends and using them to predict future behavior is one way to implement this kind of data. If you know that a product sells better during a certain season, it may be worth featuring it in your direct marketing campaigns near that season.
From refining and defining your audiences to assisting in scheduling your campaigns, customer data can be a veritable treasure trove of information when it comes to optimizing your direct marketing practices.
Expand your audience
Another way to improve your marketing campaigns is to expand your audience by finding potential customers who have similar attributes to your existing client base. For example, if you see that a specific product does particularly well with a unique subsection of your audience (like women aged 26-35), it may be worth finding a lookalike audience for this particular demographic.
Paying for targeted mailing lists is one way to achieve this. You’ll be able to curate a list of consumers based on a variety of factors like geography, age, gender, credit rating, and more.
Pick the right medium
Remember that when it comes to direct marketing, you have a variety of options to consider, from email to social media to mail and display ads. If your data reveals certain information about how different forms of communication perform with different audiences, you can leverage your customers’ preferences to increase your ROI for each campaign.
Reading up on various consumer reports can also help you ensure that the medium is a good match for your message. For example, while many people would stereotype millennials as an audience which cares more about social media marketing, some studies have illustrated that direct mail actually has a huge return when delivered to millenials.
As a business owner, you should always be looking for ways to improve how you operate. Marketing often offers room for improvement, so taking a good, hard look at your approach to direct marketing can really bolster your business’ performance.
Keep the above ideas in mind as you audit your direct marketing strategies so that you can create even stronger sales for your company.