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Selecting the Right Mailing List

Written by: Barbara Spagnola

Article Overview: A part of planning your postcard campaign included determining your target audience. You took the time to profile your current and potential customers to ensure your message is received by those who will benefit the most from your offer. The more specific you are about your target audience the more accurate your mailing list will be.

Selecting the Right Mailing List

A part of planning your postcard campaign included determining your target audience. You took the time to profile your current and potential customers to ensure your message is received by those who will benefit the most from your offer. The more specific you are about your target audience the more accurate your mailing list will be.

Mailing lists are available from a variety of companies at varying costs. What is a mailing list? It is a list of names and addresses extracted and compiled from a database of consumer and business information. At a minimum, these databases contain the names and addresses of consumers and/or businesses. Some companies specialize in databases that contain demographic information, such as income level, age, gender and occupation. Some list companies specialize in business data that includes annual revenues, number of employees, dollar amount of sales per employee, names of company officers, web sites and email addresses. These databases and the information they contain are used to select the names and addresses of those individuals you profiled when you defined your target audience.

When selecting a mailing list, the quality of the list is more important than how many names and addresses are available. An outdated list will not be helpful in getting your message to the right audience. Ask the mailing list company how often the database is updated. Ask what sources are used to populate the database. Be sure your specific target audience profile information can be used when selecting the names for your mailing list. If you want your target audience to only include males over the age of 50, you need to ensure that your mailing list company has this information available in their database so they extract only the names and addresses of males over the age of 50 for your mailing list.

Luckily these lists are available in computer usable format (i.e. EXCEL or ACCESS) so they can be used by high speed printers to automatically print the addresses on the high volumes of postcards. When requesting your mailing list, verify the mailing list format you can expect to receive from the mailing list company.

If doing a campaign targeted at current and prospective customers, remember to append your current customer information to the list received from the mailing list company. To help verify that your mailing was delivered to the names on your list, add your own name and address to the list so that you will receive your card in the same manner and timeliness as your current and potential customers.

Getting your postcard in front of your target audience, those most likely to benefit from your product or service, is very important. Select your mailing list wisely and you will increase your response rate.

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Article Tags: business data, business information, consumers, databases, demographic information, e excel, email addresses, employee names, high speed, list of names, many names, names and addresses, names of company, occupation, postcard campaign, speed printers, target audience profile, usable format



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