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In a previous article I discussed how to use an invoice ledger as a marketing tool in for a mailing list campaign. In this article I will discuss how to use the expense ledger.

Understanding sales and income is necessary but it is only half of the equation. When using mailing lists to expand your business it is vital to keep track of the costs as well as the income. By tying the cost of each promotional activity directly to its income, you will be able to determine the profitability of your marketing campaigns and be able to make better decisions on how to buy mailing lists.

ROI – Return on Investment

Nowadays one hears a lot of buzz about ROI. What exactly is ROI, anyway? It is the return on investment of your advertising expenses. Are your mailing list campaigns profitable or not? How are you going to know? The only way you will be able to determine if your marketing investments are making any money is if you track them one by one. It is absolutely crucial that you keep good records. On the income side, you used your invoice ledger to identify all sources of income by categorizing each invoice according to the source of its sales lead. Now on the flip side, you categorize your promotional expenditures according to the marketing campaigns used to generate the sales.

The Expense Ledger

Shown below is a chart of sales expenses for one year that was collected from the expense ledger. You list out all the same sales lead categories that were used in your invoice ledger. In this case we have categories for printing, phone, trade shows, ads, direct mail and miscellaneous. We are going to have to do some estimating here because some of the printing expenses were general in nature while others were tied to specific marketing campaigns. But you can get the idea.

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Graph the Results

After you have identified the sales expenses for all the promotional activities, you can tie it all together and determine the profitability of each marketing campaign (or lack of it). The thing that’s nice about a graph is that you can spot the winners and losers in an instant. Now that you know if your mailing list campaigns are making money or not, you can make better decisions on how to buy mailing lists.

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Now, please bear in mind, when you look at results like these not to panic and do anything rash! If a particular promotion didn’t pan out, it doesn’t automatically mean that you have to abandon it. Sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a “Plan B.” You should have a feel for your industry, your competition and the various media outlets and marketing channels available to your business. Your experience, abilities, knowledge and confidence should guide the decision making process.

If you find that the return on some of your promotional expenses is not as profitable as it should be, then ask yourself, “Are there any competitors in my industry that are successful?”; “What are they doing that I’m not?” Try to figure it out. Watch your competitors very closely. On the other hand you might be doing something that is very successful that your competition is completely unaware of or is unable to do. In that case, you’ve got a trade secret and you need to keep it that way.

Winners and Losers

In the previous example, several of the sales categories are pulling some pretty healthy ROI. Phone sales, field sales, referrals, repeat sales and direct mailings are all very profitable. They are all pulling income in the multiples of their expenses. This is a bean counter’s dream. The areas that need improvement are trade shows and magazine ads.

Use This Information to Help Expand Your Business

As you can see from this series of articles, it isn’t difficult to use your income and expense ledgers as marketing tools to help expand your business. This should serve as an example and give you some ideas on how to implement good record keeping in your business and be able to identify the profitable vs. unprofitable promotional activities. Surely you should be able to use mailing lists to expand your business. Most any business should be able to benefit from a well thought out direct mail campaign.

Mailing Lists Direct is a full service direct mail list company where you can find consumer lists, business lists and specialty lists at competitive prices. Mailing Lists Direct provides first rate customer support. No matter what your business needs in the way of an address list or managing your mailing list campaigns, Mailing Lists Direct will be able to satisfy all your needs. Call toll free at 800-741-0116.

Mike Doughty is a small business owner and entrepreneur with a background in direct mail marketing, manufacturing and distributon. During his career, he produced a mail order catalog and worked on many successful direct mail campaigns.

How do you take advantage of mailing lists to expand your business? Taking advantage of  buy mailing lists is one of the most effective ways to increase sales. You should be using your customer list as well as purchased mailing lists from a list broker. But even the best efforts to increase sales by using a mailing list can require very careful analysis and record keeping. In the previous article we discussed using your invoice and expenses ledgers as marketing tools to analyze your marketing efforts. In this article we will discuss the invoice ledger in more detail.

Does Your Business Keep An Invoice Ledger?

Every business should have an invoice ledger. If you have carefully kept track of the lead sources from your various marketing campaigns, then you will be able to identify the most profitable and productive sources of advertising. You can tell a great deal about the workability of your promotions and marketing by doing this very simple analysis. This example uses lead categories for repeat sales plus new sales from trade shows, direct mail, referrals, field sales, phone sales, ad sales and sales from new businesses (plus unidentified new sales). Simply prepare a spreadsheet and tabulate your sales invoices for a given period of time into the various lead categories:

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Next, tabulate the sales from the same period into the number of sales invoices. The number of sales invoices will be needed to calculate the average sales for the various lead categories:

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Next, you can summarize the data:

Graph Your Results

Finally, you can graph the results. You will be able tell at a glance which promotional activities are producing the most. The following graph shows the volume of sales for repeat customers vs. new customers and how the new customers break down into the various lead categories:

Repeat Customer Sales vs. New Customer Sales

In this example only 12.33% of the total sales volume is for repeat customers. This looks like a business that constantly must go after new customers because it has to make 87.67% of its income from new customers. This is a perfect example of why the business must analyze very carefully where to put its promotion and marketing efforts because getting new customers requires a lot of advertising and marketing. This example is very typical of a business that uses a variety of advertising sources to generate sales leads. In fact, it makes about 24 cents out of every dollar from phone sales and about 23 cents out of every dollar from field sales.

Referral Sales

Notice that one of the categories is referral sales. One of the most important ways a business can make income is from referral sales. There is no better advertising than word of mouth. In this example, about one out of every five dollars of revenue comes from referral sales. This means that the business must make up the remaining revenue from contact other than from existing customers. That involves the effective use of advertising and promotions.

A Typical Business Can Benefit From Direct Mail Marketing

This example also illustrates that sales revenue from direct mail campaigns amounts to one dollar out of every ten dollars – not bad considering that this is a typical “brick and mortar” business. In other words it is not what you would call a direct mail business because it does phone calls, field calls and trade shows, but it does make a little over 10% of its income from new customers from direct mail marketing. How would you like to make another 10% in sales revenue? You should be using direct mail marketing in addition to your other promotion and advertising efforts.

Mailing Lists Direct is a full service direct mail list company where you can find consumer mailing lists, business lists and specialty lists at competitive prices. Mailing Lists Direct provides first rate customer support. No matter what your business needs in the way of an address list or managing your mailing list campaigns, Mailing Lists Direct will be able to satisfy all your needs. Call toll free at 800-741-0116.

Mike Doughty is a small business owner and entrepreneur with a background in direct mail marketing, manufacturing and distributon. During his career, he produced a mail order catalog and worked on many successful direct mail campaigns.

Most any business can take advantage of mailing lists to expand their business. Even if you don’t currently use any direct mailing list campaign, your customer list is a valuable asset that can be utilized to grow your business. Hopefully you have also been keeping a record of your sales leads and the contacts you have made with them along with the various promotional actions that have been taken.

You should also have an invoice ledger – even if it exists in the computer or in your bookkeeping software – because you can use this as a tool to analyze your marketing efforts. The road to success is not often a very straight one. A business owner or sales manager must often use a lot of trial and error to get it right. The key is to keep good records of all your promotional actions. Advertising and marketing campaigns can be very expensive. You win some and you lose some. You have to study the successes and failures very closely and you need to keep good records to be able to pull it off.

Using the Invoice and Expense Ledgers as Marketing Tools

Every business should have ledgers for invoices and expenses. You can print them out or export them to a spreadsheet. For the invoice ledger, include columns for invoice number, invoice date, customer name, a description of what was purchased and a lead category or code for how you got the sales lead. Let’s say you want to analyze a time period of one year. Prepare the spreadsheet from all the invoices within that time period. Let’s say during this time period you generated the leads from the following sources:

• Referral – Lead generated by customer referral
• Mailer – Lead generated by direct mail
• Field – Lead generated by a field sales call
• Print Ads – Lead generated by print ads
• Website-PPC – Lead generated by pay-per-click ads
• Website-Search Engine – Lead generated by search engine natural search results
• Trade Show – Lead generated at a trade show
• Phone Lead – Lead generated by phone (NOT a follow up phone call from some other category)
• New Business – Lead generated by new business listings
• Unidentified – You want as few of these as possible

Your list of categories will probably be different, but you get the idea. The whole point is to carefully identify how the lead was generated for each sale. This is extremely important. It’s the only way to tell the difference between the promotional activities that are paying off and which ones aren’t. Now, this brings up another very important point – who answers the phone and how much do you pay them? Don’t have the mistaken idea that the receptionist should be one of the lowest paid people. You want them to have a stake in the sales revenues of the company.

You can offer a small bonus for employees who help in the sales efforts. If you have advertising with a call to action that tells the customer to call a particular phone number, then make sure that person either relays the phone call to a salesperson or logs the source of the lead. If the call is routed to a salesperson, then that salesperson is responsible for logging the source of the lead. If it comes from an ad, then they have to ask, “Which ad”. If it comes from a direct mail piece the have to ask for the ad code (you want to code your direct mailings whenever possible). If it comes from a search engine, then they have to ask “Which search engine?” This is the best way to monitor the effectiveness of all your advertising expenses.

Mailing Lists Direct is a full service direct mail list company where you can find consumer mailing lists, business lists and specialty lists at competitive prices. Mailing Lists Direct provides first rate customer support. No matter what your business needs in the way of an address list or managing your mailing list campaigns, Mailing Lists Direct will be able to satisfy all your needs. Call toll free at 800-741-0116.

Mike Doughty is a small business owner and entrepreneur with a background in direct mail marketing, manufacturing and distributon. During his career, he produced a mail order catalog and worked on many successful direct mail campaigns.

Mailing Lists

Many businesses can increase sales and improve their bottom line by using direct mail. Sending out periodic direct response mailings will create inquiries that salespeople can convert to new sales and new customers. Doing so requires the use of quality mailing lists.

A small startup may be able to do it from their kitchen table, but most businesses – whether small, medium or large – will require a mailing list service to supply the names and addresses, print the mailing pieces, prepare the mailing labels or print the names on the mailing pieces, prepare the postal barcodes and sort, bundle and deliver the mailing pieces to the Post Office. These are a lot of steps but are only the ones needed to get the direct mail pieces into the mail.

There are also some follow up and maintenance steps to do if you want to get more mileage out of the address list. Someone needs to clean the list (remove the duds and make address corrections to the good names), make selections for future mailings and merge your in-house names (your own customers and prospects) with the purchased mailing list to remove duplicates.

More Than a List Broker

A full service mailing list company is more than a list broker. Although finding the right list broker is vital to the success of your mailing list venture, as you can see there is a lot more to managing a successful, ongoing direct mail list campaign. Just consider these facts:

• How are the names going to be affixed to the mailing piece? Are you going to use mailing labels or will they be printed on the piece?
• Who is going to design the piece? Does the designer understand the necessary postal regulations? The dimensions have to be right. The location of the mailing labels, indicia and other markings have to be right. On a folded piece is the fold supposed to be on the left or the right in order to be run through the postal equipment? If they mess this up you may have to pay surcharges because the piece doesn’t conform. Worse yet, the piece might not qualify at all. Then your whole printing job is down the drain.
• If the mailing piece consists of separate parts – an offer letter, coupon, return envelope, brochure, etc. does the designer know how to assemble all the pieces in the right order? Are the pieces laid out properly to be assembled by machine? If this isn’t done right you might be stuck with a lot of manual assembly or a poor response rate. Design errors can cost you big time.
• Do you have a mailing permit or are you going to use the mailing house’s permit?
• How are you going to handle address corrections? Are you going to clean the list in-house or use a mailing service or are you simply going to skip it altogether?
• How are you going to make the selections from your in-house customer list? How often do you mail to them? What if you are doing a monthly mailing? Do you send the mailing to all the customers every mailing or do you prioritize the names? For example, do you mail more often to customers who have purchased something recently? Do you mail less often to customers who have not purchased in awhile? What are the rules? How do you make the selects?
• Who is going to do a merge-purge of your in-house names with the mailing list? Are you going to attempt to do this yourself? How can you find and remove duplicates?
• Who is going to print the piece?
• Who is going to sort, bundle and deliver the mailing to the Post Office?

Mailing Lists Direct is a full service direct mail list company where you can find consumer lists, business lists and specialty lists at competitive prices. Mailing Lists Direct provides first rate customer support. No matter what your business needs in the way of an address list or managing your mailing list campaigns, Mailing Lists Direct will be able to satisfy all your needs. Call toll free at 800-741-0116.

Mike Doughty is a small business owner and entrepreneur with a background in direct mail marketing, manufacturing and distributon. During his career, he produced a mail order catalog and worked on many successful direct mail campaigns.

July 8, 2009 – Bloomberg reports that Google Inc. is developing a computer operating system based on its Chrome Web browser, taking aim at Microsoft Corp. in its strongest market. If this succeeds, it could be a deathblow to Microsoft.

Google blogged  in a recent post that their system will be designed at first for low-cost laptops called netbooks. The company is in talks with partners on the project and computers running the software will be available in the second half of 2010.

Google already has a strong rivalry with Microsoft, which includes Web search, browsers and business applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. Windows, Microsoft’s flagship product, runs about 90 percent of the world’s personal computers. Google is also trying to spur Web-ad sales after reporting its first sequential revenue drop as a public company.

“There is a possibility that the new OS can break the paradigm Microsoft and Intel created over the past 20 years,” said Yukihiko Shimada, a computer analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co. in Tokyo. “There is plenty of business opportunity for Google in this market.”

Google said it’s working with computer makers to introduce a number of netbooks next year, without identifying any of the companies. The Chrome OS will be open-source, meaning the program code will be open to developers, Google said. The software will work on top of the Linux operating system.

Read the full story at Bloomberg.

There are a growing number of states in the US that are implementing taxation policies that are driving out many major vendors that use affiliate marketing.

This is a policy that started last year, originating in New York, and can potentially kill affiliate marketing.

This past Friday, Rhode Island issued notices to over 100 online businesses that they require states sales tax to be collected. Three major businesses – Amazon, Overstock and BlueNile told their Rhode Island based affiliates that they would no longer be able to promote their products, the Providence Journal reported.

It was announced earlier in the week, that Overstock had already dropped North Carolina, Rhode Island, California and Hawaii affiliates.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle to veto these taxes.

Clickz reported that some companies are appealing the laws in New York.

Here is another perfect example of how taxes hurt small business and kill jobs?

Mailing Lists Direct provides businesses consumer lists and address lists that are accurate and affordable.

As mail volume declines, Post Offices are looking for a way to remain viable.

More than 3,200 post offices and retail outlets out of a total of 34,000 will be reviewed for possible closure or consolidation during the next three months.

The United States Postal Service is burdened by a multibillion-dollar deficit and may have to reduce the number of its operations and post offices across the country. Each year, hundreds of postal operations worry, but this coming fall could be the single biggest consolidation in Postal Service history.

Downsizing is a business imperative, says Linda Welch, acting vice president of delivery and post office operations at the Postal Service. “Revenues have declined, and mail volume continues to decline,” she says.

Not only has the recession contributed to a pullback in direct  mail  marketing advertising, but the utilization of e-mail and electronic bill paying has lessened the flow of mail as well which in turn has hurt the Postal Service.

In March, Postmaster General John Potter asked Congress for the right to reduce the mail week from six days to five, for a savings of $3.5 billion. Shutting down post offices will have similar cost-saving effects. And most Americans say they’re OK with the cutbacks, as long as they don’t have to pay more to send mail. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that more Americans would rather the Postal Service curtail services than seek a bailout or raise stamp prices.

Most people say they understand unless it happens to be their post office.

Mailing Lists Direct provides consumer lists,  mailing lists by zip codes and address lists. Businesses can buy mailing list information that is customized for their specific needs in order to run efficient advertising and direct marketing campaigns.

You probably  have been in this position before, where you wanted to purchase something but you have no idea where to start. Millions of companies have come out of the woodwork today offering similar products and services across the board. For consumers and businesses this deliema can be overwhelming. This can put a lot of stress on consumers or businesses that have to make purchases from other companies. To solve this problem businesses are now targeting their public. Many have found the perfect solution is to rent or purchase mailing lists.

If you decided to search for the appropriate companies that would have the best products or services you are looking for, it could take what seems like an eternity. Even in the end, you might end up choosing the wrong companies. When you purchase mailing lists that are custom made, meaning they can be specific to a particular target market, area or demographic, you will usually get much better results. These mail lists ensure privacy, accuracy and are affordable. Mailing list companies provide information on how to purchase mailing lists that are affordable and accurate. These lists should come from a mailing list broker that you can trust.

Before you search for a provider of mailing lists, you need to determine what your target market is. You can select from a number of criteria, such as age, ethnicity, income, location and more. If you are looking to purchase a mailing list, make sure your list broker has an extensive knowledge of the mailing list market, as well as the necessary expertise to find the perfect list that is bested suited for your industry. A specialty list provider can help you find that narrow niche you need to succeed.

Do you need a Specialty List or Custom List?

Here are a few things to consider when you purchase mailing list data:

• What is the estimated household income of the consumer
• Are children present in the household
• Is the consumer a homeowner or renter
• What is the type of lifestyle
• Are magazine subscriber files-provided
• What is the annual business revenue, employee size and industry
• What is the contact name and information
• What are the number of trade show attendees
• …. plus more

A trusted mailing list provider will research and find the best fit for his client. After this, the list broker will prepare the data into  mailing lists that are available for the client at cost effective prices. There is no need to worry about your purchase when this service can simplify everything for you. The best purchase will be made when you have the best recommendations.

Mailing Lists Direct specializes in helping those looking to purchase mailing lists in order to find the perfect  list for their business.

Did you know that buying mailing lists in a recession can actually help increase your sales? When you buy a mailing list from a reputable list broker, make sure the marketing list contains accurate and up to date contact information of your potential sales leads. When you purchase accurate data and current mailing list information that targets your public, you have the best chance to present you story, sales pitch or product. Direct mailing list campaigns have not gone out of favor because of today’s economy, but instead it is just the opposite. The fact is that more businesses are utilizing this method as a way of generating sales leads. The last thing a business should do is contract in a recession. In fact it is the perfect time to expand. Buying mailing lists that are targeted to your audience and are cost efficient is one of many approaches businesses should be taking in today’s environment.

When you purchase a mailing list, it allows your business the opportunity to not only generate sales leads but in turn increase revenues. Because direct mail list campaigns are specifically targeted to your audience, they allow you to easily promote your services or products efficiently.

Let’s say you are a startup business but no one knows anything about you. How do you get your message out there? A marketing list prepared for you that addresses your potential customer would allow you to deliver your message to the right customer base.

Are you offering any specials, launching a new service, changing your business model or expanding your product line? Let your customers know what is going on. When you buy a mailing list from a reputable mailing list company, the marketing list will contain potential customers most likely to purchase your product or service. This is extremely important since your return on investment ROI plays a big part in the decision you will make. A reputable mailing list company should be able to help you with all aspects of your marketing campaign, including the mailer, design layout and printing.

As you can see, the use of a direct mailing list campaign as part of your marketing arsenal is actually cost effective when compared to other means of marketing such as media advertising. Buying mailing lists have proven to be an effective and low cost marketing method for advertising and promotions. Pulling back your promotions in a recession is never the answer. It most certainly will make things worse. Find the most cost effective way to get your message out there to your potential customer. Buying a mailing list from a trusted mailing list company is the answer. Do your homework. Make sure the mailing list company you choose is reputable, affordable, have accurate mailing lists and an excellent customer service department to help you through the process. Don’t give up. Promote! Promote! Promote!