The Direct Digital Marketing Mandate

Updated: January 14, 2010

The fusion of direct marketing and digital marketing—direct digital marketing—preserves the inherent value of direct marketing, resolves its historic downsides, and leverages the immediacy and accountability of digital channels. Direct digital marketing is a digital marketing method that delivers relevant communications that are addressable to individuals through the three primary digital channels—email, Web, and mobile. While traditional direct marketing methods use a consumer's postal address to initiate a dialogue, direct digital marketers use an email address, a Web browser cookie, and a mobile phone number to not only initiate a conversation, but build and sustain an ongoing profitable relationship with a consumer.

One of the most valuable elements of direct digital marketing is its ability to expand measurability and enhance accountability. Rather than measure important but one-dimensional data points like response rates and dollar amount per order, direct digital marketing affords a wide array of valuable data points that measure the impact of a campaign at different day parts or at different stages of the shopping process, and the difference between the lift in sales from repeat customers and the total sales from new customers, for example. Because direct digital marketing campaigns use the three primary digital channels to communicate with consumers, additional measurement is possible. An example is a multichannel direct digital marketing campaign that properly recognizes the value of the website as a direct digital marketing tool and quickly calculates a correlation between the duration of a website visit and total dollar amount spent per consumer.