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| MAILING LISTS |
In previous tutorials we covered the Marketing Database, Campaign Planning and Lifetime Value of a Customer. We learned about the 40 / 40 / 20 rule in direct marketing that says the success or failure of any direct marketing campaign is due to the following mix of components:
40% = The Offer
40% = The Mailing List
20% = The Creative
In this tutorial, we’ll look at the mailing list component. We’ll focus specifically on postal mailing lists. We’ll look at what kinds of mailing lists are available and how to segment them in order to identify our target audience and enhance our chances of success (We will cover e-mail lists in part II).
Determining Your Target Audience
Before you can begin the list selection process, you need to have a thorough understanding of who your customers are. Whether you are mailing to businesses or consumers, if you can develop the perfect snapshot of your customer, finding more of them will be a lot easier. If your company is just starting out and you have no customers, you'll need to research your marketplace and glean intelligence from how your competitors are marketing and who they are marketing to. If you already have customers, you should reach out to those people who have demographic and psychographic similarities to your customers.
Data Appending Services
Many direct marketers use data appending service companies to analyze their customer file. These companies take the customer file and overlay it with demographic and/or psychographic data. You can then append this information to your database and rent lists that match your target criteria. This will help you with future analyses and house file segmentation.
Just make sure that when you utilize data appending, you don’t append information that you don’t need. For example, you don’t append telephone numbers if you don’t have a telemarketing program. Information that you don’t apply to anything is useless information that you have to pay for. Remember, the goal is to learn about your customer so you can better identify which mailing lists to test.
Now let’s look at the 3 basic types of mailing lists.
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