Seven Basic Tips for Finding Successful Lists

You’ve read a lot about improving the performance of rented lists. Here are seven basic tips that you should consider even before you decide to acquire lists for any promotion.

1. Select the best type of offer to meet your sales objective. If you want to do lead generation, you should plan a “soft offer” that makes it easy as possible for a prospect to sign up online or by mail. Offer your prospects free information, a free newsletter subscription, a white paper or a discount coupon, so that you can generate the largest possible response. You must get the complete name and address with the first mailing.

To find a more qualified buyer, you should make a “hard offer,” such as a discount you receive only when you visit a store in person, a premium you receive for taking a test drive, or a paid membership to get discounts on books. The mailing generates fewer names, but the hard offer generates highly qualified lookers or actual customers.

For Web site traffic, you’re aiming at getting visitors to click on your site. Go beyond a casual click if you can. More sites are getting the prospect’s complete name and address by having a free login on the home page to enter the site, with no obligation, or offering an e-mail newsletter. For a hot Web site, you might request a full registration.

2. Your first mailing should search for prospects, not sales. For effective lead generation, choose lists that contain all your available prospects, that are not narrowed down so far that you eliminate live prospects. Rent the largest list you can afford, knowing that only 1.5% to 10% will respond. Look at each list as a big pond that you are going to troll to identify the special people who will respond to your offer.

The purpose of your mailing is to find prospects, not to create them. Old-time direct marketers would say you are asking prospects to “raise their hands” to indicate that they are interested.

3. A mailing list is not a list of “leads.” Many hours are wasted every day in list searches that attempt to narrow down a list to only the people who are truly “leads,” the small number of people who are really sufficiently “hot” or “warm” to be given to a salesperson, or entered into your customer database. In demographic lists, some mailers tightly limit income selections to “high rollers” In B-to-B marketing, a mailer will whittle down a list to top executives, when they really should go after a larger universe.

A compiled directory list of 100 “family restaurants” might be regarded as true “leads” for a local salesperson, but a direct marketer would mail to the entire universe first, to select very few who would “raise their hands” as live prospects.

4. Some of the best lists are magazine subscription lists. Subscribers to any special interest publication have already identified themselves as your prospects. They will be more responsive than almost any other list category.

There are hundreds of excellent lists from controlled circulation business magazines, for which no-charge subscriptions are given in exchange for detailed information from subscribers about their job function or title, number of employees, annual sales, and especially the authority to purchase specific products, many of which are branded products that you may be selling.

Other magazines, especially consumer subscription lists from publications for which the subscribers pays for the subscription, seldom have “selects. To evaluate a magazine list, look at a copy of the magazine to lean what kind of people are reading the magazine. In searching for lists of art collectors for a Massachusetts gallery, we found the best magazine had 87 full pages of ads for art galleries; obviously the readers were all potential art buyers.

Compiled business lists from Dun & Bradstreet and InfoUSA permit selection of every industry by fine-tuned S.I.C. codes, executives by name, and telephone numbers. When your target is every business in a specific industry, there is no better source.

5. Order enhanced lists to improve your targeting. Paid magazines like Fortune don’t collect customer data lists, so they enhance them with consumer data—age, income, and lifestyle selects, but no business data. More lists than ever are being “enhanced” by being matched against these nationwide household databases. Consumer magazines like the New Yorker or Smithsonian do not gather data on their customers, so they are now matching their subscriber lists against giant databases that are full of personal information.”

6. Look closely at the sources of your lists. Ask where the list came from, who put it together, what are the sources of the names? Some lists are based on inquiries, some on actual purchases or transactions. Some lists are built from successful marketing companies where every name is treated as special and valuable; others are quickly harvested from sweepstakes mailings or from Internet clicks.

Use lists of names generated by direct mail instead of compiled lists wherever possible; compiled lists cost less but are less targeted and less frequently updated. Use compiled, membership or directory lists whenever they are appropriate — for example, the American Medical Association list mat offer more doctors with specialties than any other source.

7. Review list datacards to validate every list. Be sure to check these data elements near the top of every datacard: Date of last update: If the last has not been updated in the last 12 months, be wary.

Unit of sale is the average purchase of people on the list, or the subscription price of a paid magazine, or the average donation to a non-profit. Give priority to buyers if you sell products, but don’t pass up good lists just because they don’t have a buyer history.

Look at the source of the list (“media”). Are they 100% direct mail or 100% compiled? Internet generated, self-reported or culled from responses to space ads? Direct mail respondents will get better results if you’re selling by mail, but won’t apply to other types of purchasing.

These seven topics touch most of the key elements in list selection. Remember, as a buyer of lists, you can ask the questions and get good answers. The list owners who create the lists, the list managers who re-sell them through brokers, and the brokers who buy and sell complex lists every day, are some of the smartest people in our direct marketing industry. Let them help you!

Fred Morath is a direct mail consultant, copywriter and list specialist at Fred Morath Direct Marketing, Natick, MA.