Direct marketing is a form of marketing that attempts to send its messages directly to consumers, often without the use of intervening media. In addition to avoiding traditional promotional media, it also trys to avoid traditional distribution chanels such as retailers. Direct marketing differs from regular advertising in that it does not place its messages on a third party medium or in the agora, such as a billboard or a radio commercial would. Instead, the marketing of the service or commodity is pitched directly at the consumer.

The most common forms of direct marketing are:

• Telemarketing - direct contact with the target market via telephone calls. Marketers call telephone numbers from a list of telephone numbers purchased for this purpose. Occassionally random dialing will be used but this is inefficient because most of numbers dialed will not be part of the target market and will therefore be unlikely to buy.
• Direct Mail - direct contact with the target market via the post office or courier companies. It is the longest-running form of direct marketing and is characterized by high volume use of the postal service to send a message to all postal customers in a chosen area or all customers whose addresses have been taken from a list according to a chosen set of criteria. As a bulk mail activity involving a mailing piece of uniform size and weight, typically enclosed in a paper envelope, it attracts a favourable discounted postage rate.
• Internet spam - direct contact with the target market via the internet, Web, or email
• Fax - bulk faxing, is less common than the other forms — partly thanks to laws in the United States and elsewhere which make it illegal.
• Direct Sales - this includes door-to-door sales and commercial sales "parties". This techique is used in insurance sales, multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes.

Direct marketing typically relies heavily on computer databases and is therefore an example of database marketing. Most direct marketing is done by companies whose only function is to manage and perform direct advertising, rather than by the advertised entity itself. Direct marketers have been long time customers of computer databases, and they often have very sophisticated criteria of inclusion and exclusion in their mailing lists. Recently, political campaigns have begun to appropriate the methods of direct marketers (or to employ direct marketing firms) to raise money and create activism.

Direct Response

A related form of marketing is direct response marketing and its most common form today is infomercials. They are typically called "direct response" marketing rather than direct marketing because they try to acheive a direct response via television presentations. Viewers respond via telephone or internet, credit card in hand. Order forms or coupons in magazines and newspapers are another type of direct response marketing.

Mail order is a term, seldom used today, that describes a form of direct response in which customers respond by mailing a completed order form to the marketer. Mail order is slow and response rates are low. It has been eclipsed by toll-free telephone numbers and the internet.

Legislation

In the United States, the United States Postal Service maintains that direct marketers pay the majority of the costs of mail. Bulk mail thereby subsidizes low cost stamps for letter, magazine, and book mailing. No such compensatory relationship exists with e-mail or faxes, which require the receiver to pay for bandwidth, storage space, or paper and toner, and some of the solutions to e-mail spam in the United States have involved instituting a freight cost on mass e-mail to make it productive. Such solutions have not been universally lauded, as they leave the recipients of unsolicited e-mail with the problem of storage and bandwidth consumption and would increase costs to companies that send only solicited mass mailings.

The United States telemarketing industry was affected by a national do-not-call list, which went into effect on October 1, 2003. Under the law, it is illegal for telemarketers to call anyone who has registered themself on the list. People can register for the list on the web at donotcall.gov (http://www.donotcall.gov/). After the list had operated for one year, over 62 million people had signed up [1] (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/06/dncanny.htm). The telemarketing industry opposed the creation of the list, but most telemarketers have complied with the law and refrained from calling people who are on the list.

References

• Nash, E. editor (1992), The Direct Marketing Handbook, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, New York.
• McDonald, W. (1998), Direct Marketing, An Integrated Approach, Irwin McGraw-Hill, Boston.