1. Warm Up Leads With Content
First, despite the immediacy of direct response marketing, keep in mind that its success is dependent on your long game. If you’ve never posted on LinkedIn before and your very first post is a direct response offer, potential clients and customers have no idea who you are.
This is also referred to as “nurturing action.” Create content about your product or service’s benefits in a separate campaign, with lighter calls to action such as “sign up for our newsletter here.” This is part of building trust with your target customer so that when the time comes to introduce the direct response offer, they know who you are and can make a decision to buy more easily.
2. Craft A Truly Irresistible Offer
Creating an irresistible offer often has pressure around it, so think about it this way: what’s an offer that potential clients would have few arguments against? Perhaps it’s on the financial side, and your service offers a significant savings when compared to others in the industry. Perhaps it’s a value proposition that could alter the lives and businesses of the client’s.
Float different offer ideas to past clients, mentors, or trusted friends who can be honest with you about how to make it more appealing. “The more irresistible it is, the faster you’ll receive positive responses and increase revenue.” says Suby.
3. Focus On Your Funnel
Many business owners believe that a robust website is needed to convert customers, but really, an in-depth sales funnel will do the trick. Suby shared that the sales funnel is the most important part of the direct response marketing operation. Ideally, it should have all the information a potential client needs to make a decision, and have a number of opportunities to “buy now.”
The more specific the information, the better. Share exact statistics on how many followers past clients gained from your services, or what percentage increase past clients have seen in their monthly sales from your product.
4. Make The CTA As Easy As Possible
Whereas most marketing campaigns will have a CTA like, “schedule a call with a sales associate from our team now!”, direct response marketing works better when the CTA is simply to buy the product. The nature of direct response marketing offers benefits on the metrics side – the performance and outcomes of the campaign will be easy to track and measure. If the conversion rate is lagging, consider changing the CTA or the offer. Metrics are your friend in this form of marketing.
5. Create a sense of urgency.
Finally, urgency is key for expediting the sales process. Even if the offer is utterly irresistible and all the information is in place to lead to a sale, a customer can still make a mental note to purchase later then completely forget if there isn’t some sense of urgency.
Run a flash sale for only 36 hours, or only offer a limited amount of slots with your next program opening in two months. Whatever spurs them to make action NOW, add it to the campaign.
This underused form of marketing, when done correctly, can skyrocket your sales. Many campaigns can be done throughout the year, so get to work strategizing!
