How To Improve Your Direct-Mail List Tampa FL

Who receives your direct mail can often be more important—and bring better results—than what you send them. To improve the quality of your direct-mail efforts, it is important to improve the quality of your mailing lists.

Here are some suggestions for upgrading the caliber of your prospect profile and ensuring you get your message in front of the right people:

1. Look at your "house" file, the mailing list made up of your own customers. There are various sub-groups within your house file—those who buy commercial printing; those who buy publication, or book printing;, those who buy advertising specialties; those who spend between $10,000 and $20,000 annually; those who spend more than $20,000 each year; etc. Try to identify these sub-groups. Code them, and mail targeted house campaigns to gain maximum returns.

   By segmenting your list and writing copy with appropriate offers to those sub-groups within your house file, you stand a far better chance of increasing your returns than if you send the sample package and offer to your entire mailing list.

2. When you make "outside" list selections, don't be afraid to test a variety of lists and offers. You may be pleasantly surprised to get good results from unexpected quarters. If you can define exactly what it is you plan to offer, a knowledgeable list broker can give you ample suggestions on how to proceed.
3. Don't fence yourself in. Look outside your region for additional business. Mailing lists are often sorted by geographic location breakdowns. Try a few, and keep track of the results.
4. Test your new lists carefully. Instead of mailing to all the names on a given mailing list, select a small cross-section for testing. If you are fortunate to get successful results, then expand your subsequent mailings gradually to the balance of the list. This is the proven way to solvency in direct-mail list scheduling.

5. Take a hard look at your previous mailings. With all the time, effort, and expense put into testing different lists, it is essential to study past performance before launching new direct-mail campaigns. Before you select a list for testing, check to see if it has been used before by others offering similar products or services. What was in the mailing package? When was it mailed? What were the results? Close examination of past performance—both in terms of lists you have used and lists used by others—is a solid guide to wise list selection for future mailings.

   If one list has worked well, try to find others in the same category. Before you spend money on a direct-mail campaign, try to come up with projections based on a realistic appraisal of past mailings to the names on the lists of your schedule.

6. How often should you send your mailings to your own house file? As often as you can! Be guided primarily by the results of your previous efforts; but do not be afraid to mail materials to your own customers frequently throughout the year. Remember this: If you don't tell them you love them, someone else will.
7. Supplement your direct-mail efforts with a call. Many mailers find that a phone call to a business prospect, when combined with a direct-mail package, brings excellent results. It also gives you an ideal opportunity to obtain live responses from your customers to help you develop changes to your copy or to come up with a new offer.
8. The more targeted your lists, the higher your returns will be. So you might consider doing a special study of your "active" file to determine which mail code areas produce the greatest amount of income. If you can determine that 50 percent of your orders come from a small mail code grouping, large, universal, marginal lists can be turned into more profitable ones. Before running a list rental, you can ask the broker to select only those mailing areas that produce your top returns. This procedure may also allow you to decrease the size—and expense—of your mailings, and still pull the same number of orders.

9. For reasons which are not entirely clear, January is considered the number one, most responsive mailing month of the year—at least in the United States. Maybe it has to do with people being inside during the colder months; possibly it is tied to New Year's resolutions or getting back to business after the holidays. Factors determining peak response may be entirely different south of the Equator.

   Whatever the reasons, it is wise to follow the best mailing patterns to maximize your results. Better still, study your own direct-mail results to determine your seasonal patterns.

10. After the final results of a mailing have been tabulated, it is helpful to group your lists into three categories: primary market, secondary market, and peripheral, or fringe, market. Different payback time periods apply to each of these three categories. Rather than trying to project future trends from the overall returns of the past, you may want to project solely on the basis of your primary market. This three-way list grouping procedure will help you be more precise in your projections.

Whatever you do, remember one thing: Nothing happens until somebody sells something. Good Hunting.

George's company, ProTrain, is available for special assignments in sales training and marketing. He can be reached at georgemreinfeld@juno.com.