If your company sends out promotional material of any kind that directly reaches your customers and potential individual customers, you will have a process that heavily features direct marketing. Direct-to-consumer marketing, or business-to-consumer marketing techniques are a great way of targeting specific consumers and attracting them to your organisation to buy your products and/or services. This helps to establish and cultivate long-term relationships with customers that become loyal customers over time. If you do rely on direct marketing as a company, it is very important that you consider utilising the data protection service due to the pressures and limits of GDPR requirements.

What is direct marketing?

Direct marketing is any type of promotional material that has been designed for a specific type of person and is sent directly to them. This will usually include telling consumers about your product, services, fundraising projects, or your aims and ideals as a company. Direct marketing can come in many forms, from direct postal and print methods, to SMS, phone calls, or emails.

The benefits of D2C marketing

Curating marketing and sales strategies that are effective when going direct can become an integral part of your organisation and how you plan to grow in the future. This matters across all industries and no matter what type of product or service you sell, and what type of customer you generally have. Some of the benefits of D2C marketing include:

Greater control over the customer experience – by selling direct you have control over everything that your customer experiences on the journey pathway when they purchase from you. This creates a seamless experience that is key to building brand loyalty.
Increase profits – by cutting out the middleman with marketing techniques and going direct to the consumer you are cutting costs and helping to increase the profit margins that you experience.
Better customer insights – selling direct allows you to have a better line of communication with customers, which can help you build a database of consumer analysis and specific product feedback that feeds back into product and service development.
Agile retail – you can adapt better and more quickly to consumer trends and specific customer feedback than you would be able to as a traditional retailer.
Increased brand awareness – you have greater control over how you create your brand image and how this develops in conjunction with your direct interactions with customers. This helps build brand awareness over a shorter period of time than with traditional retailers.
Flexibility – marketing and selling direct allows you to have more flexibility in terms of pricing and subsequent promotions and discounts that can then be marketed directly to your customers.

Looking after GDPR when using direct marketing techniques

It is vital that you look after the privacy of your customers and protect their rights under data protection law. This should be a central part of any marketing campaign that you put together. Whether you are marketing B2B (Business-to-business) or D2C (Direct-to-consumer) you must comply with the legal aspects of data protection set out in the UK. This includes:

UK GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA2018)
Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (PECR) – this is for any form of electronic marketing alone, such as automated phone calls, text messages, and email marketing campaigns

How do the laws apply to direct marketing?

Before you commit to a marketing campaign and before anything is sent out to consumers, there are a few things that you need to do to comply to data privacy regulations. This includes the following processes:

Identify – identify whether or not what you plan to do is considered direct marketing. If it is then you need to think about what you are using it, rather than just describing what it is that you are doing. Build a profile on a consumer, look at how you generate leads, whether you share data with third parties, and have clear protocols in place.

Plan ahead – it is important that you formulate and implement a direct marketing plan that has data protection at its heart. You need to establish a lawful basis for the direct marketing, ensuring that all information processed is accurate and is not kept for longer than it needs to be.

Collect data – when collecting personal data to be used for marketing purposes you need to be fair and transparent. You must be clear with what you want to do and ensure that your privacy notices are easy to understand and comply with UK GDPR to explain why you want to use the data, if you will share it with third parties, how long you keep it, and offer the right to object.

Respcct – you must ensure that you respect the rights of the consumer and that you have the mechanisms in place to do so. If a consumer objects or opts out of direct marketing at any time you need to provide them with a clear way to do this quickly and efficiently, such as including an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every marketing email.

Outsourced data protection is the best way to ensure that your organisation is fulfilling its legal requirements in terms of data protection. Companies that deal with data protection are the best placed to offer professional advice and insight into your operations, should you utilise direct marketing to target specific consumers as potential future customers. Direct-to-consumer marketing is an effective and profitable method of reaching new and old customers, but you do need to be careful that you act within the parameters of sensitive and secure GDPR protocols when doing so.