Direct marketing “consists of direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships” . In a direct marketing campaign, an organization sends a specific, usually time-limited promotional offer directly to individual customers via mail, telephone or email and not via mass communication media such as billboards, press, radio and television. This generates a direct and rapid response in the form of an order, a subscription renewal, a request for further information, a visit to a retail outlet or an internet site.

Direct marketing often leads to direct distribution. Since the consumer responding to the offer orders the product directly from the company, the latter can do away with intermediaries and resellers. This model fits cultural organizations whose mission is to host live audiences (theatres, symphonies, museums…) because tickets can be easily mailed or printed from the internet.

Direct marketing is not new: catalog sales have been around for a long time. However, the evolution of information technologies (particularly database management and the internet) give this tool a new youth. Thanks to these technologies, it is now possible for an organization to weave a dense customized relationship with each individual customer with the goal of better meeting their needs.

Direct marketing offers several advantages:

• More accurate targeting than traditional advertising, since only the consumers whose buying potential has been identified will be contacted with a customized offer. With traditional advertising, targeting is only as precise as the audience of a given media. For example, an advertisement in a newspaper will be seen – and perhaps read – by its readers, who are not all actual or potential customer of the product promoted in the advertisement.
• Accurate return-on-investment measurement of a promotional campaign, since the rate of response to the offer and the cost per contact is known. For example, if one sends a thousand letters with a specific offer and twenty people who received the offer respond to it, one can calculate the return on investment of the campaign by dividing the amount of the twenty sales by their total cost (time spent formatting the offer and drafting the message, costs for paper, printing, envelop, stamp and handling.)
• A more personalized, two-way communication stream with the target, since the latter is encouraged to respond directly. This consumer feedback is essential to improve the service offered and customer satisfaction.
• The possibility to send dense messages and complex offers without with the space limitation of traditional media.
• Reduction in lead time between the initiation of the offer and its reception by the customer is reduced, since the offer can be sent at anytime, independent from formal publication schedule.

For all the reasons above, direct marketing is widespread and is becoming the main means of communication and distribution for many cultural organizations.