Using direct marketing to enhance customer value in complex service environments

Abstract

Direct marketing continues to be an alluring marketing communications channel for practicing marketers. Marketers are leveraging increased access to information about customers, the ability to profile those customers and increased ability to reach those customers via electronic channels to customize and ‘direct’ messages to ‘known’ recipients. Despite these improvements, direct marketing is not becoming more effective. In this paper, we show that when marketing complex, contractual services: email underperforms as a replacement for postal mail but telemarketing has the potential to increase the effectiveness of Postal letters.