Direct marketing is a way of advertising directly to the consumer through fliers, catalogues promotions
and street campaigns. Traditional methods of advertising such as radio, television and news papers are
not used in direct marketing. Telemarketing, email marketing, leaflet distribution, broadcast faxing and voice mail marketing are some of the methods considered as direct marketing.
Direct marketing has definite characteristics in its marketing style, which differentiates it from
other marketing methods, such as the ability to directly reach the consumer without the use of
intervening communication media, and the ability to be able to track and measure the positive
responses received by the consumer.
Direct marketing is mostly used by small to medium business enterprises, which may not have a well
recognized branding and also which run on limited budgets.
Direct marketing methods are generally very precise, with what it wants to convey to the consumer.

Direct marketing is mainly popular due to its ability to track and measure the positive responses.
Even though direct marketing is considered as measurable, in certain instances such as email marketing, it is not possible to measure how many of the emails were effectively read and how many were treated as junk or spam.
Network marketing which creates a direct marketing network is a popular method of marketing. It is a multi level form of marketing where the sales people or marketers reach out to the consumers through other known parties, creating a direct marketing network. The direct marketing network is based on a hierarchical structure where the company concerned is at the top of the direct marketing network. The marketers and the sales man, who are mostly employed by this company, are at the next level of the direct marketing network, where they are solely responsible for the marketing and sales of the products or services.
These marketers, unofficially, or in some instances officially, get the assistance of people outside
the company, to market through word of mouth, distribution of fliers, propagating emails and various other direct marketing methods thus distributing their work load to reach a large number of consumers. The direct marketing network is not static and can keep growing due to the number of marketers building up in the bottom level.
Taking into consideration promotional activities through email, it gives a clear picture as to how this direct marketing network is built up. Promotions are decided by the heads of the marketing team which is then distributed to the marketers for emailing. The marketers in turn send these promotional emails to consumers, whose email addresses, are available with them. For propagation purposes these emails are sent with a prize tagged to it, which in most cases offer, entry to a raffle draw, if the advertisement email is forwarded to a specified number of email addresses. Due to the attractive prizes on offer the receivers of this email forward it to many other recipient s, assisting the direct marketing network to grow.