Using a direct marketing association

Direct marketing is a very popular form of marketing, as it at least guarantees the marketer that a potential customer will focus his or her attention for a second or two on what's being offered. The question here is about direct marketing associations. Let's look at some basic information regarding using a direct marketing association.
1. Direct marketing is a huge, complicated affair. We're talking about millions of homes, millions of individual names, lots of routes and addresses and zip codes and so forth. A direct marketing association helps to bring order to the chaos. Many consider it a miracle that the mail works at all, much less works more or less according to plan. Using a direct mail marketing association is just another way of providing order and security to your marketing efforts.

2. Some direct marketing associations are better than others, of course. For a beginning business, just dipping its toes into the waters of direct marketing, so to speak, its going to want to do some test runs, target some potentially hot areas, find out of direct marketing is an approach they want to use in the future. These companies don't need to assume they have to go with a less creditable direct marketing association because they are small. Some direct marketing associations, if they're big enough and busy enough, will say, "Well, in order for it to profitable for us, you know, you're going to have to do this many orders." And maybe that many orders, whatever it is, doesn't really fit into the parameters of the what you've planned financially, research-wise, and so forth. So you go on to the next direct marketing association. The point it, is might be better to pay a little more to go with a reputable direct marketing association because that's the only way to effectively conduct your experiment, your research. If you go with a dingier outfit, initially disappointing results may be due to the comparatively low standers of the direct marketing association that you've chosen.
3. One benefit of direct marketing associations is that they've been around a while and therefore have learned a trick or two. Small business owners confess to being intimidated, at first, by the thought of direct mail marketing, of sending their name and offer into so many stranger's homes. It's a little paradoxical, actually, when a businessperson's anxiety comes from getting into too many homes than too few, but this probably can be chalked up to the natural nervousness that comes when one's facing a big seemingly impossibility tangled process. Again, though, that's where the experience of the direct marketing association comes in. What you essentially do is say, "This is how many we want to do, we're selling hot tubs, therefore upper middle class neighborhoods in such and such an area seem appropriate," etc.
4. A good direct marketing association will let you in on the things it's learned about selling hot tubs. That is, they might have additional suggestions, or point out that such and such an area has been infamously low in sales.
5. The best way to find a direct marketing association is through trade magazines, newsletters, and, of course, the Internet. You can also talk to other businesses about what they did, who they used, what they liked, what they didn't like, what was successful, what turned out to be a dud, and so forth.
6. The benefits of direct marketing is that you're not crossing your fingers that so and so will see your commercial, so and so your billboard, so and so your magazine add. These other approaches to marketing have their advantages, too, of course, but direct marketing is unique in its old-fashioned feeling and the fact that you can take advantage of the experience of the direct marketing association is in your favor.