Many people pay far
too little attention to the quality of their mailing list.
Don’t you be one of them. After more than two decades of direct
mail successes (and failures!), here’s my advice:
Be as specific as
you can. If you sell Jeep accessories, find Jeep owners.
Don’t get caught up in the demographic maze. Let’s say you know
Jeep owners are on average 24-45 years old, home owners, male
and earn between $45,000 and $75,000. That’s an easy list to
find. But how many of those own a Jeep? Less than 1%? If
you’re sending to 100 people to get to one Jeep owner, you
mailing is doomed. I repeat, don’t get caught up in the
demographic maze.
Avoid list
brokers. That’s a bit harsh, but pretty good advice just
the same. There are good ones, but you can get to the end of
your budget before you find one.
List owners are
okay. Associations rent their membership list (often just
to members), magazines rent their subscribers, these types of
“owners” are generally a pretty good source for mailing lists.
The two companies
we use most often:
-
www.infousa.com for businesses and residents (taken from
phone book listing, they allegedly update by phone annually
for business listings)
-
www.zapdata.com for businesses (Dun & Bradstreet names
plus some others, more reliable for larger companies than
smaller)
Don’t be afraid
of grunt work. If your target is sales managers of
manufacturing companies, your best approach may be to buy a list
of manufacturers and call them to get the correct name and
spelling of their sales managers. Ouch! I know, an amazingly
difficult and time-consuming task. But when you’re done, wow,
what a primo list!
Simply put, the time
and energy you spend getting the list “right” is time and energy
very, very well spent.
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