Get The Right Direct Mail List
 By Patrick L. Wynne

Direct mail campaigns can be highly profitable or highly unprofitable. Make yours a winner.

Since a typical return on mailed offers is less than 1 percent, you need to minimize costs. If only one out of 100 mail pieces results in a sale, that single sale must cover the costs of all the failures.

The most important factor in any direct mail campaign is getting the right list. It doesn’t matter how persuasive your sales collateral is, or how stupendous your product may be, or how great the value you offer – if you’re talking to the wrong people. A terrific offer for snow skis to residents of Guam is a waste of money.

The good news is that the most critical element for getting the right mailing list is something you should already have: a detailed profile of your best customers.

The bad news is, it’s not always easy to closely match the demographic and psychographic profiles of your best buyers to commercial lists. But don’t blame list brokers for a bad return on your mailing if you can’t describe in detail your own target market.

Your in-house list, a compilation of names and addresses of people who already have paid for your products or services, is your best list. If what you sell is worthwhile, these people are probably eager to buy again. When seeking additional lists, get clones of these people.

But what kind of list broker should you deal with? Brokers who offer a wide variety of lists are a good place to start. A large selection should increase your chances of finding a good match or of sifting a large database to get names that most closely resemble your existing customers.

However, if you have a narrow market niche, it may pay to find a broker whose specialty matches yours. Often times a compiled list drawn from public sources like phone books and government records won’t serve as well as a response list, which is based on people who have purchased previously. Brokers handle both types.

Other considerations are:

1. Will the broker provide a list for a test mailing? Some brokers provide free samplings of a few hundred names, which is much better than paying for 50,000 names only to find out they weren’t worth the cost.

2. How up-to-date is the list? Americans move an average of every five years, so in any 12-month period, 20 percent of a list can be obsolete. Brokers can’t guarantee responses, but they should give you a good idea of what percentage of a list will be deliverable, which is to say what percentage reaches the named recipients. The industry standard is about 92 percent.

3. Can the list broker manage the entire project? You may have already contracted with someone to create the sales material that goes inside your mailing. But some brokers work with printers and mail houses. These brokers can bring all the other elements of a project together, even delivering mailings to the post office.

4. Can the broker recommend co-op mailings to cut your costs by sharing with other, non-competitive, but complementary mailers?

You can find a broker by contacting a local chapter of the Direct Marketing Association. But “mailing list brokers” also are as close as the Yellow Pages or a Google search.

Prices for lists vary greatly. Generally, the more names you buy, the lower the rate per name. The more categories you screen (age, income, hobby, etc.), the higher the cost. Expect to pay just pennies per name at the low end, but you can also pay several times more than that for precise, detailed profiles.

Shop around. Some brokers don’t charge extra for multiple selection criteria. Although many brokers restrict their rented lists to one mailing, others permit multiple mailings. For $99, mailing list giant infoUSA will analyze your own customer list and based on that, will tell you how many prospects there are in a particular geographic area. You pay only for the prospects you select.

(Posted December 2005)

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