4 Strategies to Increase Direct Marketing Revenue and Build Your Brand

This is the time of year when marketers are analyzing how to improve their businesses. As much as you might want to latch on to the latest fad, your success or failure comes down to doing a few key aspects of marketing better than your competitors.

To help you get a jump-start on the new year, here's where I suggest committing the bulk of your resources:

1. Identify your best potential targets. You’ve been hearing this song for a long time, but here's why it’s more important than ever: Marketing is simply too expensive to waste money on mass distribution and low response rates. That model worked when paper and postage were cheap, but those days are gone forever.

In addition, while you might argue that online alternatives provide the low costs you seek, print still powers many companies’ engines. Until that changes, spend more time figuring out how to make print work better rather than trying to eliminate it from your marketing mix.

That process begins with ongoing investments in database marketing tools, services and analytics that'll help you mine the most desirable customers. Developing customer intelligence is all about gaining individual customer insights that truly enable the delivery of “right message, right channel, right time.”

You can only accomplish this by taking a strategic approach to understanding your customers, rather than a last-minute, ad-hoc precampaign analysis. Building customer intelligence is a process that starts with understanding the value of each customer.

The next phase is to segment customers into relatively homogeneous groups that have relevance to your products. Typically, there'll be multiple segmentations that provide insights into the multidimensional nature of most people. There might be life-stage segments, relationship lifecycle segments, product needs’ segments or potential value segments.

Then add predictive analytics to provide a more quantified likelihood to purchase and potential value for each customer for each product or product category.