Selectabase

7 Ways to Increase Sales by using Direct Marketing

Top tips on growing your business and getting more sales by using cost effective direct marketing techniques.

1. Identify and contact your key existing customers. Put in place an ongoing CRM program designed to retain and grow your key clients, who often account for the majority of your sales. Schedule regular telemarketing calls, and send quality mailshots targeted to individual customers.

2. Keep in regular contact with your remaining customers. Use direct marketing as a cost effective way to stay in touch with the majority of customers outside your top clients. Send regular newsletters about your business and direct mailshots with exclusive customer offers.

3. Follow up your leads. Make sure that the sales leads and enquiries you receive from emails, website enquiries, events, phone enquiries and so on are logged into a database and then followed up on a regular basis using direct mail.

4. Find more prospects like your existing customers. Profile who your best existing customers are and what they have in common, then set out to find more leads like them based on their type of business, location, lifestyle, age and so on. Source a mailing list that matches these criteria and send them a mailing.

5. Identify and target new markets for your existing products. Work out who else your product or service could be sold to, then source a mailing list of these prospects. Send a mailing which includes testimonials from your current customers.

6. Launch new products for your existing markets. If you can identify simple add-on’s and product extensions which are cost effective to produce, then launch them to your existing customers first using a mailing. They’ll be more receptive and give you valuable feedback. But be careful not to split your current sales.

7. Find and target new markets for new products. Research potential markets for your new products and then source mailing lists of potential customers, to contact using direct mail and/or telemarketing ( but make sure phone numbers are screened against the TPS or CTPS).