This year, an early Labor Day on Sept. 3 will lengthen the fall selling season. And, an early Thanksgiving on Nov. 22 will create 32 shopping days before Christmas. Since direct mail success depends heavily on targeted names and addresses, it’s a good time to review your own mailing list program.
Experienced marketers are already mailing their early fall and Christmas promotions. As a former list broker, I’d like to offer some basic list information for small businesses that are less familiar with direct mail.
Any business can increase its sales and profits with direct mail and e-mail. Whatever you’re selling or promoting, you can grow by mail marketing. You started your business because you had a special product or service, in a specialized marketing niche. Direct mail works because you can extend your reach beyond your own front door, to any area of the country where your product would be welcome. It’s far superior to opening a branch, moving to a mall, or hiring sales managers for different cities. And for local advertising in your community, it’s far less expensive than media ads.
Begin by getting acquainted with the available lists that reach your market. Every list program starts with a search to find the lists you need. There are over 60,000 postal and e-mail lists on the market and they can be found with a simple online search.
Get valuable outside help from a list broker. You can add a professional marketer to your staff at no charge, by renting lists through a broker. They will find lists to fit your program and develop a full list-marketing plan, usually at no charge, since their income comes from their sales of lists. Their experience and their list knowledge are priceless. Even a small broker with two or three employees handles dozens of different accounts every month, and they really know (or can find) the B-to-B and consumer lists that you want.
Mailers can order low budget compiled lists. All mailers can rent their lists from the list owners named in the datacards, but most large mailers order lists through brokers. The best direct response lists, from record clubs, memberships, mail order buyers, and magazine subscriber lists have minimum orders of 5,000 names and are priced from $95 to $200 per thousand.
Smaller or infrequent mailers with limited budgets can order lower-priced compiled lists. Most frequently used are national household demographic databases of 95 million to 165 million names — Equifax, Experian, Acxiom, and InfoUSA. Prices are as low as $40 per thousand names with minimums of $50 to $125. These demographic lists offer selection by age, estimated income, single family home, homeowner, renter, age, new movers and much more.
The two most widely used compiled business lists are InfoUSA, compiled from Yellow Pages and telephone verified, and Dun & Bradstreet, their national business reference database. You can select any business, fine-tuned by 4-digit and 6-digit SIC codes.
Start compiling your own list, and turn it into a marketing database. Every company should record names of all their buyers and inquiries, either in a simple file like Microsoft Excel, or a larger database file like Access or Mail Order Manager (“MOM”). You’ll get more names in the fall and winter than in spring and summer, so now is the best time to add new names. Turn your into customer list into a marketing database by recording transaction information, like amount of purchase, type of purchase, credit card or cash–any data that will help you identify your best customers for future mailings and e-mail campaigns. Record the source of the name (e-mail, space ad, online, walk-in, referral), date of transaction, gender, age, any data than can be transcribed accurately and effectively for identifying customers for future mailings.
A loyalty program builds a powerful database for retailers. Here’s a full-scale loyalty-marketing plan that many companies can use. It makes registration in your database automatic, and avoids the problem of most databases: Employees have no time to enter the data into the list.
Issue a computer-based “rewards” card like the supermarkets use, to record every customer’s transactions. Connect it to every register and checkout point.
Turn this database into a “loyalty” program by mailing frequent discount coupons, $5 or $10, for every $100-$150 worth of purchases, to increase traffic.
Then e-mail these same customers as often as once a week, with special offers, weekend sales, or holiday specials. Mail low-cost full-color postcards to tie in with your e-mail promotions.
With this combination of services–computerized registration, discount coupons, plus e-mail and direct mail contacts, you have created a powerful multi-media database that will bring in sales every week of the year. It really works!
Fred Morath is a direct mail consultant, copywriter and list specialist at Fred Morath Direct Marketing, Natick, MA.
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