Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Direct Marketing Plan
Direct Marketing Plan
Plan Template
An initiative of CMA’s Direct
Marketing Council
Contents
Overview 3
What is Direct Marketing? 4
How Direct Marketing fits into business planning 5
Elements of a Marketing plan 6
Marketing plan to Direct Marketing plan 7
Direct Marketing plan template & guidelines 8-17
Overview
A plan can help to organize many pieces of information &/or people and guide
thought processes. While there are often changes in direction, a good plan
contains most information needed to identify a new route.
Direct marketing is media agnostic. DM media includes, but is not limited to:
Long term Goals What will we achieve over the next 3-5 years?
Marketing Plan What are the right product & service solutions for key
target customers and prospects?
How will investment be allocated between acquisition,
retention and development to meet the business goals
and maximize customer value?
• Executive Summary
• Current Situation These are the key elements of a
• SWOT Analysis & Summary marketing plan for reference.
(key lessons and implications)
If a marketing plan doesn’t exist,
• Objectives missing information can be included in
• Marketing Strategy the direct marketing plan.
• Tactics
• Timelines
• Budgets & Forecast
• Measurement and Controls
Marketing Plan Direct Marketing Plan
Introduction
Written after completion to provide a summary of contents including:
• The challenge or opportunity
• Decision is required by the audience
• Resources and investment required
• The recommendation
• Expected end result, critical timing elements
Overview of the marketing plan
• If the direct marketing plan is a subset of a marketing plan,
provide a recap
Background and past findings / results
• Describe what worked and what didn’t, research findings and
customer insights, implications and recommendations
• May include SWOT findings: Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats
Overview of the Marketing Plan (if applicable)
Marketing objectives
• Marketing objectives should have a direct correlation to business plan objectives
• Describes what you need to achieve by when and by how much
• Marketing objectives need to be quantifiable (SMART: Specific, Measurable,
Actionable, Realistic, Time specific)
Marketing strategies
• Have a direct correlation to the marketing objectives and explain how you are going to
achieve the objectives
• Single focus statements to support one or more objectives
Marketing tactics
• Tie directly to the marketing strategies and outline what specific actions to implement
each strategy
• Tactics are budgeted individually to roll up to a total marketing budget
Background & Key Learning
• Tactics break strategy into manageable sections and provide the details and
specific activities to be undertaken
• Tactics are tracked to measure success or failure over time
• Tactics are budgeted individually to roll up to a total budget
• Tactics may include: email (plus HTML), web/online/viral, event marketing,
sales promotion, guerrilla marketing, DRTV, direct mail, DR radio, DR print
advertising
Target Audience
• Key section of the plan - the better the target market description, knowledge
and segmentation, the more successful the plan
• Demographics, psychographics, past purchase behaviour, segmentation
&/or profile summaries
• Should include financial evaluations, behavioural summaries,
(transactional), attitudinal understanding by key segments
• What are their perceptions today and what do we want them to think about?
Why should they believe it?
Product Offering / Key Message /
Offer
Product offering
• Summarize the key products and/or services and the information needed for a
customer or prospect to make a decision
Key message
• What is the most important thing the customer or prospect needs to know and
what information supports it?
Offer / Call to action
• What do we want customers/prospects to do and why should they do it? What
is in it for them?
Expected Results and ROI / Key
Measures
Timing
• What is the timing? Are there implications of being earlier or later?
• Ensure plan is realistic and can be implemented with available resources
• Develop master timeline sheet to manage the big picture and the individual
tactics simultaneously
Budget
• What is the budget and anticipated return on investment?
• What are the current Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and what are the
projected KPI’s (e.g., cost of acquisition, cost of retention, attrition, lifetime
value, etc.)