Direct mail is one aspect of direct marketing, a discipline within the science of Marketing that is used by many businesses and organizations.
This type of marketing focuses on discovering, analyzing, and recording the actions, transactions, and opinions of individual customers.
Direct marketing, and so direct mail, is intended to better develop and maintain customer relationships.
Direct marketing has at its core the technique of contacting customers directly – generally through methods like mail, email, phone, etc. The recipients of direct marketing attempts are identified as potential customers through some sort of criteria. Advertising such as a billboard or radio does not meet the guidelines of direct marketing.
Direct marketing is considered to be a strong method for marketers because of the sure way of measuring what promotions worked and what didn’t through the tracking and analysis of specific campaigns toward specific customers and their responses. This measurement of results is key in the direct marketing world.
The number one method of direct marketing is direct mail – the use of the postal service to deliver correspondence to customers.
Some of the types of direct mail in marketing are postcards, envelope mailers, self-mailers, catalogs, snap mailers, dimensional mailers, and intelligent documents.
Benefits of direct mail as a direct marketing technique include each of the following reasons: It is possible to specifically target the customers; the mailer can be personalized to the customer; it’s easy to record which things worked and which didn’t; the strategy can be varied to help obtain the maximum results; and the contact strategy is very flexible.
Disadvantages of the direct mail system are as follows: The cost is higher than most other forms of mass promotion (because of all that has to be mailed); keeping up valid and high quality mailing lists is difficult; and because of its lack of professional development, direct mail has a poor reputation, especially among customers who see it as “junk mail.”
Most spam messages and junk mail are not technically methods of direct marketing, or direct mail, because the recipients have not been identified through some sort of criteria.