Direct Marketing

About Direct Marketing Incentives & Premiums

Direct Marketing was established three decades ago and works closely with customers to source and supply incentives and promotional gifts for the corporate and mail order market. The company collaborates with trusted suppliers in the Far East and other markets, delivering high quality bespoke and off the shelf items, working to the highest standards of quality control, British Standards and global standard compliance.

Automating a critical business process

Direct Marketing first called on PCM Systems to assess the potential for automating their business processes, where one of the biggest challenges lay in calculating shipping costs based on sizes of shipping boxes and quantities in each box.

Direct Marketing imports goods from around the world, typically visiting trade shows to source innovative products for promotions. The research work involves identifying products and taking down details, typically over a two week period resulting in the collection of a significant amount of data which then requires processing on return to the home office.

The existing manual system required office staff to request images and pricing information on individual products, then to create a costing sheet based on unit costs. There was a significant mathematical challenge in sourcing shipping quotations then calculating final costs for the end customers based on a range of quantity breaks.

Speeding up costings and quotations

PCM developed a bespoke software package bringing together customer, supplier and product information, based around a simple dashboard which enables the Direct Marketing team to add a product and specify additional details such as how many are contained in a box and the dimensions of the packed unit. The system then automatically generates costs based on any selected quantity break. It can upload and automatically watermark images, generate customer quotations and even produce shipping labels.

Because this is a Cloud-based system, a significant additional benefit is that information can be input whilst buying trips are in progress and is then immediately accessible from the company’s head office, speeding up responses to customers and also working as a CRM system to manage contacts with suppliers.

Additional funding through Leeds Enterprise Partnership

Working through PCM Systems, Direct Marketing benefited from funding to part pay for software development through Leeds Enterprise Partnership as part of their initiative to help make businesses in the region smarter and more efficient.