What is Direct Marketing?
The CMA Direct Marketing Council explores and responds to various issues affecting direct marketing professionals. We recently reviewed and updated our mandate to ensure that we continue to deliver value to CMA members.
The path to this mandate led to many interesting discussions on the current state of direct marketing (DM). We looked at traditional definitions of DM and agreed it was time for an update.
The traditional definition of Direct Marketing is: a marketing discipline that seeks to elicit an action (such as an order or a request for further information) from a selected group of customers in response to a communication. The communication may be in any of a variety of media and response should be measurable.
The world of the direct marketer has changed with the proliferation of online and digital media, changes in consumer preferences and access to information, and the move towards insights-based marketing. The differentiator that DM once owned – the ability to measure results – is now a requirement for most, if not all, disciplines and media.
Taking all of this into account, the council drafted a new definition: Direct Marketing is the use of media to directly engage targeted audiences to drive profitable business results.
However, while preparing this blog to invite input from the industry, I realized that the definition needs to go one step further and expand on DM’s measurability factor.
I propose an even more refined definition:
Direct Marketing is the use of media to directly engage targeted audiences to drive profitable business results that can be tracked, recorded, analyzed and stored for future retrieval and use.
So, DM Council and CMA blog readers, what do you think?
By Rosalie McGovern, General Manager, Marketing and Business Development, Direct Marketing at Canada Post Corporation and the Chair of CMA’s Direct Marketing Council
