As you may know, direct marketing is a type of promotion that involves transmitting information about a product, service, or company to a potential consumer without the involvement of intermediaries and third parties. In the context of ICO, direct marketing is performed through email newsletters, SMS, push notifications, and instant messaging. However, when the direct marketing strategy is implemented incorrectly, people may feel that you are violating their personal boundaries. Below, our ICO marketing experts from Coinband will provide you with comprehensive ICO direct marketing guidance, explain how to avoid these mistakes, and, in general, help achieve your goals.
Why Is Direct Marketing Important?
So, what is direct marketing for ICO? As we have already said above, this type of crypto marketing is distinguished by the absence of any intermediaries in the process of interaction between representatives of your project and a potential investor. The primary goal of direct marketing is to establish a trusting relationship with this investor. The final goal is to motivate him or her to take part in your ICO based on their individual needs: basic, psychological, or social.
At the same time, the potential token holder has to be perceived in moderate isolation from the general characteristics of your target audience, so it is important to take into account his or her individual behavioral patterns.
Thus, if you follow our ICO guide to direct marketing, this approach helps to obtain the following benefits:
- Attracting the attention of a potential investor to the ICO event through direct contact with representatives of the audience;
- Maintaining interest in the project through a personal demonstration of the advantages and benefits that are relevant to a particular investor;
- Quick feedback – if you fail to interest a specific person in your offer, you will at least be able to extract valuable insights from this interaction about why he or she is not ready to take part in the ICO;
- Building loyalty to your Web 3.0 project through a personalized approach that is unachievable with other marketing methods.
Direct Marketing Implementation Options
Let’s continue our ICO marketing guidance by reviewing the most effective direct marketing options for Web 3.0 solutions. They are the following:
- sending personalized messages via email;
- sending personalized push notifications;
- personalized SMS mailing;
- personalized mailing in social networks.
Getting contacts with potential holders of your tokens is quite simple: if they are already members of your community, you will already know how to contact them. In the implementation of subsequent actions, automation may be useful: currently, there are many bots (they are paid, but their cost quickly pays off) that will automatically substitute the names of your ICO buying marketing lists into message templates.
However, at first glance, a simple strategy can be disrupted by the privacy policies that have become more stringent in recent years. These policies can be applied depending on the country in which a specific recipient of your message is located. We will discuss this in more detail in the next paragraph of our ICO direct marketing guide.
How to Comply with Privacy Policies in Your Direct Marketing Strategy
If we follow one of the most common privacy policies that apply to all residents of the European Union (we mean GDPR) in our ICO guidance direct marketing, they state that sending advertising messages as part of your direct marketing strategy using private accounts in social networks, email services, and messengers, as well as phone numbers, is only possible if you:
- received direct consent from the recipient;
- received soft consent from the recipient.
According to this ICO direct marketing checklist, the concept of “direct consent” means a direct survey of your crypto community about whether its members want to receive mailings from you (this question should be conducted individually, with the offer of both consent and refusal options).
As for the so-called soft consent, it can be obtained when a specific member of your crypto community personally provided you with their contact information (while you were acting on behalf of your project) and allowed them to be used for your marketing purposes. Of course, hardly any marketer will advise you to create questionnaires for your ICO direct marketing GDPR plan to directly find out whether you can use the contacts of a specific person to solve marketing problems. Therefore, instead, you can choose more abstract wording (and, of course, do not forget to give him or her the opportunity to refuse active interaction with you).
If we talk about identical legislation that applies to US residents, it is worth mentioning the CCPA. In general, their provisions are very similar, which means that you can also use the above instructions when interacting with your American audience when implementing your ICO direct marketing strategy. However, for better awareness and to avoid possible fines, you should still analyze this law on your own.
Ultimately, it would be better for you to consult with a lawyer who is well-versed in local legislation or simply contact a crypto marketing agency that will take on all tasks related not only to direct marketing but also to the promotion of your Initial Coin Offering event as a whole. This way, you will not only be able to save your nerves and budget, and also get the opportunity to spend the freed-up time on less trivial tasks related to the further development of your Web 3.0 project.
Conclusion
We hope that thanks to this direct marketing guidance for ICO, you know about the most effective methods of direct marketing for ICO and also about existing regulations, including GDPR. Therefore, now, you will be able to implement your ICO promotion strategy without any special risks. However, if you want to delegate this task to professionals, feel free to contact the Coinband team.
