Direct Marketing

Direct Marketing really is centered on mail order, TV infomercials, newspaper ads, and magazine ads. Direct marketing is about making a sale and that is it. It is purely a numbers game. What I mean by that is when you decide to send out a sales letter asking for money in return for a product or service you are looking for a response rate (% of people that buy) most direct marketers are pleased with a response rate of 1-3%. That means that for every 100 sales letters sent only 1-3 people actually bought. You think that is pretty bad. Well in reality it's pretty good because the mailing or ads were exposed to say 100,000 people. Our response rate was 2% so we had 2000 people buy our product. Now let's say that our product sold for $25.00; that means that we just made $50,000 (2000 people X $25.00). That is not bad income for a few days work!

Direct marketing is not that simple it takes a lot of research and money to find the right audiences to focus on. There is hours upon hours spent refining the sales letter or ad before it goes out. It is rather expensive to mail a letter to 200,000 people and get the letter copied. It takes a lot of research and creative marketing to create a successful direct mail campaign. Most seasoned veterans know that they all are not going to be successful it is just a matter of working a plan in small numbers till you find a good response rate then ratchet up the numbers.

Direct marketing can be very lucrative but it is not an easy business to start. My recommendation would be to find someone that has done it, is good at it, and learn from them. It will cut years off of your learning curve.