From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Direct marketing is a form of marketing that attempts to
send its messages directly to consumers,
without the use of intervening media.
The longest-running form of direct marketing is known as direct mail and is characterised 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. The second most common form of direct marketing is telemarketing, where
marketers call selected (or random) telephone numbers. E-mail marketing is a
third type of direct marketing and may have passed telemarketing in frequency at
this point. Many commercial e-mails are considered spam. Finally, a fourth type of
direct marketing, bulk faxing, is now less common than the
other forms — partly thanks to laws in the United States and
elsewhere which make it illegal.
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 victims 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.
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.
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.
