FAQ
1. What exactly is direct marketing?
2. What exactly is a mailing list?
3. What is done to all the lists to help me mail smart?
Answers
1. What exactly is Direct Marketing?
Direct Marketing is widely integrated throughout all advertising media - direct mail, catalogs, telephone marketing, newspaper, magazine, television, radio, interactive, and other media. It is the targeting of personalized messages to promote a product or service, to inform, and/ or to create a sales transaction.
In the nineties, both direct marketing expenditure and sales annual growth rates were reported in the 8% per year range. Significantly, expenditure growth in the five year period 2000-2005 will grow at an annual rate of 7.1%, while revenue will grow much higher by 9.6% per year.
These trends should lead to higher gross profit margins for most direct marketers. Moreover, in all cases - advertising spending, revenue, and employment - direct marketing growth out-paces total U.S. economic growth.
Consumer sales through direct mail catalogs hit $47.3 billion in 2000.
Kirk Integrated Marketing Services Ltd. focuses our activity on includes all direct response advertising communications through mail or other delivery services including catalogs, cards, card decks, letters, brochures, pamphlets, flyers, video tapes, audio tapes, diskettes, and promotional items.
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2. What exactly is a Mailing List?
Mailing lists contain names and full addresses. And they can have hundreds of thousands of names. When marketers rent a list, they have no interest in individual information. Mailers want to know the characteristics that put all those people on a particular list. For example, a list of subscribers to a golf publication might represent potential buyers for a new type of golf club.
The names on a list become individuals only when they reply to your offer and become your customers. Then you can serve them just as personally as small town merchants did long ago. You should keep accurate records of purchases and preferences to help you better talk to your customers.
You may have your own in house mailing list already, or Kirk can help source one for you for your upcoming mailing.
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3. What is done to all the lists to help me mail smart?
Sophisticated computer programs can sort and eliminate duplicates with extraordinary speed. A "merge-purge" program first combines (merges) the names from all lists being rented, then deletes (purges) the duplicate names, leaving just one name and address to receive the mailing.
Merge-purge is not only used to ensure that duplicates aren't mailed, it is also used to create new mailing lists. You can, for example, create new markets by matching what they have decided are the most likely characteristics of buyers for their products from a wide variety of lists. It is estimated that there are more than 15,000 consumer lists containing 2 billion names available today. Many of those names are duplicates that are removed by computer matching.
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