By Onukegbe Ebere Grace
The purpose of this research work is to appraise the application of direct and online marketing in the Banking Industry. Direct and online marketing use a wide variety of channels to reach prospects and customers. Participating companies can use these strategies as instruments to rate their performance in relation to the best practices of high performing product or service. The following objectives were formulated; to determine the reasons for application of direct and online marketing, to evaluate how effective channel of communication impacts on the banks profitability, to ascertain if the application and usage of direct and online marketing is deceptive and fraudulent to the banks customers, to determine if there are benefits tied to the application of direct and online marketing. The study had a population of 2,401, out of which a sample size of 343 was realized using Taro Yamane formula. Questionnaire was primarily used for data collection. 343 copies of questionnaire were distributed and 304 copies were collected. The survey research method was adopted for the study while chi-square was used to test the hypotheses. The findings showed that the application of direct and online marketing communication enhances marketing of banking products and services, effective channel of communication impacts positively on the profitability of the bank, application and usage of direct and online marketing by zenith bank is deceptive and fraudulent to their customers, the benefits tied to direct and online marketing attracts customer’s patronage. The study concludes that direct and online marketing is a major index in increasing the return on investment and productivity level of banks. The study recommends that Banks should periodically organize seminars and symposia for their customers on the need to safeguard their pin code and in doing so give them quality services on automated teller machine.