Direct Mail Plays Central Role in Marketing to Hispanics

A new report from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), in conjunction with PSA and Zubi Advertising, shows that 92% of all marketers and agencies in the Hispanic market use non-catalog direct mail and more than half (52.1%) use telephone marketing, writes MediaBuyerPlanner.

According to the study, 77% of active Hispanic direct marketers specifically tailor their non-catalog direct mail messages for the Hispanic audience, while about 75% of Hispanic marketers collect consumer data about language preference and proficiency, and age and gender.

Other findings:

• One out of two marketers (48.1%) who promote to Hispanics report that the majority of their Hispanic-specific promotions are written or spoken in both Spanish and English.

•  One in five say that most of their promotions are in English only (20.8%) or that they have separate English and Spanish language versions (19.5%).
• The majority of respondents (84.4%) who market to Hispanics say that they do not create different versions of their promotions based on dialect and colloquialism.
• Two out of three Hispanic marketers (64.9%) do not create different versions of their promotions for different U.S. locations.
• Of the online and new media channel options, the most prevalent among companies that market to Hispanics is non-email Internet marketing (58%).
• 53.7% of respondents say that non-catalog direct mail effectively boosts their response rates for Hispanic consumers.
• Of those marketers who segment by the level of acculturation or by the number of generations that a family has been in the US, at least half say that the segmentation technique effectively increases response.

eMarketer predicts that, although white Americans make up about 70% of the U.S. internet population, more and more African-Americans and Hispanics are going online through their PCs and their mobile phones. Marketers will increasingly follow, targeting these segments with language and culture-specific messages, which will evolve from their general-market campaigns.

About the survey: The DMA conducted the Hispanic Direct Marketing survey in November and December 2008 through an email invitation sent to marketers, agencies, past attendees of any of the DMA’s Directo conferences, Directo Council members, as well as to PSA and Zubi Advertising clients. When the survey was closed, 77 responses from Hispanic marketers were included for tabulation.