5 ways the DMA guides will make your life easier, more productive and more profitable

Take a look at the redesigned DMA guides today to see how they offer you a practical platform on which to build your one-to-one marketing success.

Devised by numerous authoritative sources and industry experts, the guides are designed to support the DMA Code, giving you a gateway to understanding how to do one-to-one marketing the right way - for every channel and every sector - to put your customer first and drive your business growth.

1. Put your customer at the heart of your marketing to enjoy greater prosperity
The DMA is here to help you put your customer at the heart of your one-to-one marketing – to make your marketing a fair, honest, sensitive, genuinely beneficial service to your customer and thus nurture your own sustainable, responsible, long-term success.

The new DMA Code lays out the five overarching principles that guide you to achieve this. And these best practice guides support the Code: if you follow the guidance here, you can be completely confident that you are fulfilling the requirements of the Code and operating in the right way to build your long-term prosperity.

Use these guides, you shouldn't have to compromise but can gain the clarity and confidence to deliver positive ROI today in a way that builds long-term customer value and loyalty for tomorrow.

2. Maximise your ROI
Never miss a trick – or a vitally important part of your campaign.

The DMA guides put the whole collective brain of the industry at your disposal. It's all in here: the tactics, insights, bitter experience and better ways of others, polished up, perfectly drilled and at your service, so that you can make your marketing successful first time and every time.

Whether you need a new idea to improve your response rates or just want to be sure that you've thought of everything, the guides are full of tips and ideas that you didn't know, had forgotten or just hadn't fully appreciated the potential of before.

Keep the guides to hand to help you optimise your project at every stage and enjoy maximum campaign ROI.

3. Push your creativity
With authoritative, constantly updated information and advice, the guides liberate your decision-making and free your brain up to concentrate on creating marketing magic. You no longer need a law degree in order to know the right way to act – it's laid out here, clearly and with common sense, to release you from the inertia of uncertainty and give your campaign a big kick of confidence.

Use the guides to find out what's required and what's allowed, to skip beyond "safe not sorry" and to push your creativity without risk.

3. Learn more, learn quickly
The guides are marketing's biggest cheatsheet – but it's definitely not cheating to use them. We all need to step outside our comfort zone sometimes to get to grips with the new channels, new ideas and new practices that pop up in our paths.

Conveniently, we've written the guides at two levels, allowing you to get informed at a glance and further educated with a deeper reading. So rather than spending your day Googling disparate, potentially dubious sources to piece together scraps of understanding, just dive into the relevant section of the guides to get a solid overview, quickly.

And coming soon, the content within these guides will also be plugged into the vast resources of the DMA – articles, blogposts, expert member organisations, infographics, research, events, case studies and more – to give you a simple portal to the deeper detail that you need, whether you're checking compliance, putting together a presentation or seeking creative inspiration.

Use these guides to rapidly improve your expertise and remove the uncertainties that hinder your work.

4. Improve your workflows
Efficient processes need clarity and accessibility. So we've removed the need for you to figure out how to dial best practice into your workflow – the new guides are built to BE your workflow, should you wish.

Organised into actionable, step-by-step process checklists and structured to match your campaign lifecycle, the new guides offer you a ready-to-use plan that you can build your campaign onto to make your everyday tasks smoother, less stressful, more informed and more efficient.

Never again find out too late that you've not thought to add tracking to your email links, or that you've spent weeks designing beautiful collateral that's hard to produce, or that there was an easy way to cut your costs.

You will naturally find some of this best practice obvious and common-sense – but it is equally easy for things to fall through the cracks under the pressure of deadlines, short-term goals, multiple projects and different teams. These guides will relieve you from the anxiety of having to keep everything in mind whilst you juggle a campaign-worth of other ideas.

Once the guides are up and running as a fully-interactive online tool, you'll be able to pick best practice points out to form your own checklists, tailored to your unique needs. Watch this space.

Use the guides as a starting framework around which to plan your activity and keep everyone together, singing from the same hymn sheet and free to think about the high-value aspects of your campaign rather than the administration of it.

5. Improve collaboration and communication
To create great work, you need everyone on the same page, working to the same campaign blueprint.

We've re-designed the guides to help you achieve this. Extract points from the guides to create your own agreement of deliverables – for example, between client and creative, creative and production or production and supplier. This will become an interactive feature as we develop the online tool, but we've already divided this guidance into simple, bite-sized, shareable points that you can pick up and use.

Use the guides as a reference point when collaborating with other organisations – clients, agencies and suppliers – or to put together induction documents, training materials, internal best practice or inter-departmental briefs.