There are a number of direct marketing strategies that you can employ that can help you boost your conversion rates. (By conversion rate is meant the percentage of prospects who end up becoming paid customers or subscribers of your product or service. More on that later in this article.)

If you have been struggling to make any sales in the direct marketing industry, then you need not fret. Direct marketing is can be broken down into a science. Even if you may not be a people-person and you lack the charm or charisma of a savvy sales dog, you can still make it big in direct marketing, as there are many direct marketing strategies you can follow. But there is but one strategy, that if you employ it properly, your direct marketing sales can explode and you will see exponential growth:

And that is that you absolutely must recognize and accept the fact that direct marketing is, always has been, and always will be, at its very crux, a numbers game. It doesn’t matter what kind of personality you have. It doesn’t matter how good your salesmanship skills are. Ultimately, no matter which way you slice and dice and dissect your direct marketing efforts, it all boils down to a numbers game. What does that mean?

There is a direct marketing sales strategy known as “The Sales Funnel”. It is an analogy that tempers your expectations and provides you with a fixed goal post to help you target and fine tune your sales and marketing efforts and tactics. The way it works is thus:

Imagine an upright funnel, with the wider end at the top, and the narrow end at the bottom. You have 100 unqualified sales leads that you pour into the top of the funnel. You’ll notice that the funnel gets narrower the further down you go. So out of those 100 unqualified sales leads, you might find that only 10 of them are actually interested in buying your product or service. These are your qualified sales leads.

And then out of those 10 interested buyers, only 3 of them are actually serious and probe deeper into the buying process.

And then of those 3, only 1 of them actually decides to go through with it and make the purchase. So, to recap, out of 100 leads, you had 10 qualified buyers, of which only 3 were actually serious about making a purchase, from among whom only 1 person actually made a purchase.

As you can see, each step in the process of turning a visitor from an unqualified lead, to a qualified lead, to a prospective buyer, to an actual sale, represents a smaller number of people, analogous to the mouth of the funnel narrowing the further down you go, until there is only room for one person to pass through the tip of the funnel at a time.

By approaching your sales process in this manner, you will be able to mentally visualize the scope and the amount of effort that would be involved in order to get just one sale. Many businesses fail because the would-be entrepreneur becomes discouraged after a handful of rejections or a lack of sales. But what this direct marketing method teaches is that failure leads to success. In order to make sales, you have to have failures. This sets the foundation and the basis for the attitude with which you should approach direct marketing, and you should adjust your strategy and your efforts accordingly. Patience, persistence, and discipline breed success. Discouragement, inconsistent effort, and lack of planning breed failure.

What is your direct marketing strategy?