Direct marketing: Reach your audience at every step of the customer journey

High-end direct marketing campaigns now prioritise tangible and tactile marketing, such as direct mail, letters and books, over digital communications. These vital materials show the target audience a deeper level of care throughout their customer journey, capturing their attention and achieving a more lasting impact.

This article explains how commercially effective end-to-end direct marketing services – cleverly combining analogue and digital communications – can elevate your brand and deliver measurable results.

What is direct marketing?

Direct marketing involves sending physical and digital messages to your target audience to encourage the desired commercial response, whether an interaction or a purchase.

But how do you ensure your brand reaches your audience in today’s fast-paced, multi-channel marketing environment? An environment where customers struggle with message fatigue and data overload.

Paragon’s Marketing Services advocates ‘direct marketing activation’. This solution engages your customers with a unified marketing campaign and personalised experiences that cut through the noise, whatever the channel.

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey refers to the various stages a potential lead goes through before acting in line with your business’s goals.

Marketing professionals need partners to navigate the customer journey and optimise returns. Integrated data fuels tailored marketing strategies and imaginative campaigns, resulting in positive outcomes in an ever-changing market.

Paragon offers campaign management and other services that connect with your leads, win them over, and convert them into customers by targeting every stage of their journey.

Direct marketing across the customer journey

People typically take four steps in their customer journey:

1. Awareness : 

   At this first stage, you need the audience to know what distinguishes your product or service. Direct marketing boosts brand awareness, helping potential leads to understand your brand and the problems it solves. Direct mail is one example of tangible marketing that achieves high attention. In a JICMAIL study, consumers viewed direct mail for 108 seconds over 28 days. Business mail did even better, grabbing people’s attention for 150 seconds.

2. Consideration  

   At the next step of the customer journey, people  have identified a  problem and are considering how to solve it  through research. Marketers, procurement professionals  and brand  managers looking  to optimise their customer engagement strategies should  consider  digital marketing campaigns. They help nurture the audience’s interest  and build trust through personalised content  while driving results. 

3.  Decision making: 

   By this stage, your potential customer is interested but may need incentives to help them decide. Multiple-channel strategies that combine digital adverts with direct mail and compelling offers help to drive conversions. Our direct marketing campaign for Hyundai Motor Company generated interest in the   KONA by bridging the gap between physical and digital. After identifying target drivers through data and analytics, we marketed directly to high-value hot prospects through physical mailing packs and emails. Learn more.

4. Advocacy:

   The final step in the customer journey is building long-term relationships. Innovative  retention strategies, including personalised  customer journeys and brilliant experiences, can increase brand loyalty and turn customers into ambassadors. Combining data with  other insights, we developed a  personalised  communication strategy for Bupa that met its customers’ needs, improved  engagement, retained business and created brand  advocates. Read more about creating a seamless customer journey for Bupa.