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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.

Welcome to the Marketing News Roundup blog. Here you will find marketing news and information on direct mail marketing.