What is direct marketing?Direct marketing is a discipline, a subset of marketing, which permits us to carry out certain marketing tasks more efficiently. It does this by gathering, analyzing and using information about individual customers and prospects. This information enables us to identify which of the people on our customer and prospect files are likely to be interested in a particular product, service or offer. We can then select only those who will find our message appropriate and communicate with them alone, eliminating much of the wastage inherent in other forms of advertising. This is a major reason why direct marketing is so cost-effective. We can also use our customer information to develop ‘profiles’ and use these to identify the best sources of new customers.