More Evidence that with Direct Marketing, Timing is Everything!

In a recent post, we talked about the article in DM News that outlined that direct mail is the direct marketing vehicle of choice for consumers. Now, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has published an eight-part series that discusses that consumers remain highly responsive to all types of direct marketing programs -- and that the key to this responsiveness is timing. This article comes to us from Circulation Management magazine.

Consider these key statistics from the DMA series:

• On average, consumers respond to direct marketing every 16.4 days.
• By channel: 48 percent of respondents say they made a purchase or donated via catalog, followed by internet search, 37 percent; direct mail, 28 percent; and newspapers, 17 percent.
• TV, radio and magazines are the least popular DM channels.
• Top reasons for parting with money: attractive price, 35 percent; customer loyalty, 16.3 percent; uniqueness, 11.1 percent; and special offers,10.4 percent.
• Top reasons for not parting with money: not the right time, 25 percent; not relevant, 23.6 percent; already have, 13 percent; and price, 6 percent.
• Some 70.2 percent of consumers said they were privacy concerned, but as a group they were more likely to respond to direct marketing than those who say they are privacy unconcerned.
• 53 percent of the privacy concerned say they made a catalog purchase, compared with 35 percent of the privacy unconcerned.

Peter Johnson, VP, Research and Market Intelligence for the DMA believes that while privacy is an issue, as long as the timing is right, consumers will most likely respond and/or buy to your direct marketing efforts.

Wow! These are some great statistics to have in our back-pockets as marketing budgets are being set. It seems that there is always a lot of competition for marketing dollars between advertising, media and direct marketing groups within our client companies. This series points out that direct marketing is still the best bet to ensure that you meet your departmental profitability goals. In addition, when you plan your direct marketing campaigns strategically, you can statistically prove the success of each of your campaigns so that you can continue to get a nice allotment of those (sometimes) scarce budgetary dollars.

Now that you have the proof you need that your DM efforts will pay huge dividends, you may want to review our tips on how to integrate timing into your direct marketing campaigns.

And, for more stats and info on the impact of timing on DM response, check out this post from last month.