Direct Response

Direct Response Marketing plans can be highly effective at reaching your target audience and converting them into qualified leads. Inversely, if not planned properly it can also be the most expensive and riskiest approach to marketing. Score Consulting has years of experience working with clients to ensure your direct response campaign is successful. This article is our way of sharing that experience to make your next effort more successful.

Definition and Contrast to Direct Mail Marketing

Direct response marketing is a media agnostic approach to marketing that is designed to produce a specific, tracked response.  What makes this approach unique is the ability to clearly track the response that is generated and easily determine how successful a campaign is at certain intervals. Direct response marketing is often confused with direct mail marketing. However, each of these approaches has its own unique objectives and strategies. The objective of direct mail marketing is to build a company’s brand in a given market. To accomplish this goal, the advertiser will blanket a mailing list or geographic area with hundreds or even thousands of mailers. Direct response on the other is designed to get a specific response from a specific group of individuals with shared characteristics. This approach requires precision, extra planning and a better understanding of the target market.

Secret to Direct Response Success

Successful direct response campaigns require extra planning from both the advertiser and their marketing partner. The focus of this planning is placed in seven key areas:

Target qualification: The biggest driver of success in any direct response campaign is the target market. Sending direct response campaigns to every person in your town is not likely to yield great results. To be effective, you must select a target group with shared characteristics. These characteristics will govern the rest of the planning effort.

Make an offer: The center piece of any direct response campaign is the offer. This can be in the form of a coupon, a temporary price reduction, or even a free introductory service. Regardless of the type of offer, it should be tailored to fit the unique needs of the target audience.

Inspire a response: To motivate the audience to act on the offer, you must inspire a response. Depending on the offer and the type of audience, this response would be either emotionally or intellectually driven. Regardless of the type of motivation, it must be clear and well explained so that the reader is motivated to act.

Design: Design and layout are highly effective at inspiring responses. Well placed graphics and the proper balance of white space can strengthen your ability to motivate the consumer. All of the direct response material should be designed to make the desired response even more effective.

Call to action: Once the offer and motivation have been clearly established, the direct response material will make a call to action. This call to action will outline a specific way the reader can respond. Depending on the material and the audience the call to action could be anything from a phone number to call or a special webpage. The one requirement of a call to action is that the response is unique to the campaign so that the responses can be tracked over time.

Establish, review, and revise the results: Before beginning any direct response campaign, it is imperative that you set realistic, measurable expectations. Then throughout the campaign, review the responses against your expectations. This will help you to modify your approach and fine tune the campaign to get the results you need.

Score Consulting & Direct Response Marketing

Score consulting has helped several companies implement cost effective, impactful, direct response campaigns. Before attempting a direct response campaign on your own, contact Score Consulting to discuss your plan and expectations. Our consultants can help you see potential improvements in your direct response campaign. We can also assist you in clarifying your plans or even provide a turnkey direct response campaign.