Get your mailing lists targeted
Your prospect mailing lists should be as targeted as possible. General-purpose mailings are less likely to succeed. What are the characteristics of your existing customers? Like as not, you should be targeting more of the same. Look for: - Location: where are they?
- Size: how big are they (turnover or employees)?
- Business: are there any particular lines of business in which you specialise? If so you can make offers specific to that type of business (it may be a
Unique Selling Proposition
of yours)
- Who is the buyer? What type of person normally specifies and buys your type of product? Managing director? Office manager? Personnel manager? Factory manager? Sales people?
For mailings to a small number of businesses …
Use directories at the library. These can be quite adequate, but beware of out-of-date copies. In some industries, people change jobs fast and the directories don’t keep up. If in any doubt, note the company telephone number and call the switchboard to ask “who’s in charge of …”. You can’t rent mailing lists for small numbers. For larger numbers, …
Rent a mailing list. Make sure you speak to someone else who’s used the list recently and find out what response they got, and how accurate the list was. Even if they got poor response, it may be worth a test - their letter may have been no good! Discount any list where the data quality was poor. You’ll find some list brokers under “Useful Contacts” on page __ or contact the Direct Marketing Association (same section) for a fuller list. If you’re mailing to consumers…
Make sure any lists you rent have been screened against your country or state’s Mailing Preference Service. This allows people to opt out of receiving what they might perceive as “junk mail”. Apart from annoying them, you’ll be wasting time and money if they are on your list. When you rent a list …
You will normally be renting it for one-time use only. You can add any respondents to your own database, but to mail the full list again, you must rent it again. Some lists are available to purchase. You can then add them to your own database and mail them as many times as you want. The disadvantage of purchasing is that once you’ve bought a list, the supplier no longer updates it. Each separate time you rent a list, it will (hopefully!) have been updated in between times. If you don’t have a computer…
You can still rent a mailing list! You can have the names sent to you on self-adhesive labels. Attach them to your envelopes and away you go. Test a portion of the list …
Before committing to any large-scale mailing you need to test a large enough group to give meaningful results. Some lists have a minimum rental of 1,000 or even 5,000 names. See
testing
for more details. Take a look at
Microsoft's Small Business Center
for a sample mailing list service enabling you to select the following: - Mailing addresses, phone numbers, and other data for new, qualified customers for your direct marketing efforts.
- Lead-generation candidates based on your own demographic criteria.
- Customer data most useful to your marketing needs.
A Low-cost Action Plan for Mailing Lists
1. Decide who your best prospects are, based on your existing customer profile. If you’re targeting businesses then include: location; size; industry; type of buyer. For personal mailings include location, age, interests. 2. Plan a mailing campaign for your prospects. You should identify: - Your objective: what you want to achieve from this mailing (it might be ten enquiries from totally new prospects). Again, have a specific, clear objective for each mailing.
- Your offer: what you will offer the prospect to achieve this.
- Your benefits: how this will benefit the prospect.
- Your target market: as determined above.
- Likely cost and break-even point of the campaign:
Use my
Costing A Mailing Piece
resource as a worked example. Are you likely to meet your objective at a reasonable cost? If not, rethink the objective, cost, or both. 3. Create your letter and any accompaniments. 4. Identify a short-list of mailing lists from a broker. Get names of recent users. Call the recent users and ask how successful and accurate the lists were. Choose the most responsive and accurate list. Rent the minimum number of names for your test mailing. 5. Do it! If you have a computer and printer, merge the letter with your rented mailing list, print your envelopes, sign and insert the letters and post them. Be sure to include all accompaniments (e.g. brochures, reply envelopes, etc.). If you don’t have a computer, type and duplicate the letter (or have it produced by a print shop or typing bureau). Attach your rented list labels to the envelopes and post them. 6. Make sure you can respond quickly to any enquiries. Make a record of enquiries to analyse later. 7. If your printing, folding, stuffing and enveloping requirements become too large to handle yourself, use a mailing house. Here are a couple of option if you're US or UK-based:
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