Why Direct Digital Marketing Matters ?

Introduction

Direct digital marketing aims to communicate with prospects directly through various electronic mediums available like Email, Websites & Mobile. Addressability is the key in direct marketing & data around each address forms the basis for communication. For example, addressability in Email is the email address, in Websites it is the browser cookie & in Mobile it is the mobile number of the consumer. The data available in different channels helps in customizing the communication to a personal level which is the main factor for success with direct marketing. The biggest benefit of direct digital marketing is that it combines everything effective about direct marketing like personalization, relevance & nurturing with everything effective about digital marketing like measurability, optimization, low cost & instant delivery. In many instances, direct digital marketing help in forming a bridge between marketing and sales by nurturing leads in interest & awareness phase to have desire & take action which makes it a great channel to enhance lead generation when combined with other advertising channels.

Why it matters for B2C businesses?

With B2C businesses, direct digital marketing provides unique opportunities for message targeting based on segmentation done by combining behavioral data from different digital channels with enterprise customer data. A data centric marketing campaign allows for a more effective, targeted, personalized & relevant communication with each consumer. With increasing competition in many consumer spaces today, the way a business communicates with its prospects will determine its success.

Why it matters for B2B businesses?

For B2B businesses, direct digital marketing can expedite sales by having an automated way of maintaining communication with them before and after their first interaction. Quality of leads generated from direct marketing in substantially increased as interest of the prospect is self-evident through the click path and page view data.

For years, marketing budget has been loosely justified with circumstantial, qualitative & approximate data. However with evolution of digital marketing, measurability & accountability has become focus today with new metrics like email opens, page views, sms responses, clicks etc. Optimization with A/B testing & multivariate testing has also gained momentum to make marketing more feedback driven than assumption based. Although tradeoffs for different channels in direct digital marketing have been there due to varying difficulty of using different channel, balancing each channel helps in a creating a holistic campaign.

While due to low cost of direct digital marketing, it has been abused by many to distribute unsolicited messages or spam which resulted in prospects giving less attention to these. Fortunately, direct digital marketing has today evolved to reduce the impact by messages providing “unsubscribe” option & junk mail filters.