Internet Effects Direct Marketing Strategies

One of the most effective direct marketing strategies for your small business is to design an attractive and effective brochure. Unlike a letter, that may be scanned and thrown away, or a business card that is easily lost, a brochure has visual impact in a familiar format with the capacity to contain a great deal of information succinctly presented. Brochures have the added advantage of being good mail-outs for your contact list and handouts at face-to-face meetings or trade shows.

This is not to say that the well-crafted cover letter does not have a place in your direct marketing strategies.  The process of sending out a rйsumй or brochure with an introductory letter is a tried and true method of self-promotion. Normally this initial communiquй is followed up in approximately two weeks with a second letter simply thanking the recipient for reviewing your materials. (The standard rule of thumb is to keep the cover letter short and succinct.)

The Internet has, to some degree, augmented this time-tested method as well as the concept of the brochure. Any of the documents discussed to this point – the brochure, the cover letter, and the rйsumй – can direct a prospect to more information on a website or can themselves be part of a website.

Increasingly such materials are being put online to defray costs of printing and mailing. In this scenario email rises to the top of direct marketing strategies. Mass email messages serve as the point of ingress to online direct marketing. Normally the solicitation email contains hyperlinks to online information with the hope being that the recipient will click the link to access more information.

A significant deterrent to the effectiveness of email-based direct marketing strategies, however, is that multiple pieces of software exist to stop the flow of unwanted messages, referred to as “spam,” into recipients’ inboxes. In a large part these software packages were developed to stem the tide of enhancement-product ads and sexually explicit solicitations. As a result, business people with legitimate product or service offers are tarred with the same brush and face enormous hurdles in their online direct marketing.

More and more entities are resorting to a compromise position, putting the bulk of their promotional materials on a website but promoting that site via conventional direct marketing strategies like postcard mail-outs or brochure mailings. While not as cost effective as the completely electronic method, eliminating some aspect of printing and production expenses with the website can help to defray some of the overall promotional costs.

In selecting the direct marketing strategies that will work best for your business or personal endeavor, the conventional wisdom still applies. Do your research, know your target audience, carefully craft your promotional materials, and spend your budget as wisely as possible to achieve maximum coverage of your audience. No direct marketing strategies will be effective without that crucial pre-planning.

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