Business Marketing Newswire

Posts Tagged ‘Buy Mailing Lists’

UPS Logo

NEW YORK, NY – The direct mail industry is about to get more competitive – especially for business who use mailing lists for traditional direct mail advertising. United Parcel Service (UPS) is testing a new direct mail service called Direct to Door.

The pilot program is to be conducted in five markets – Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Miami, Phoenix and Washington, D.C. UPS drivers will be delivering boxes containing about 12 premium offers and samples to targeted consumers. Some of the brands participating in the test are Zappos.com, FTD.com, Bed Bath & Beyond and Sephora. Over a dozen brands are said to be participating in the pilot program, according to a recent AdWeek article.

The AdWeek article also emphasizes that UPS feels that its drivers are its secret weapon. Being the world’s largest package delivery company puts its drivers on the doorsteps of more households than any other package delivery service. UPS director of new product development, Lisa Lynn, says that customers trust the drivers and see them all the time. She also states, “We can leverage the familiarity and trust people place in us to help our customers grow their businesses.”

Lynn also added, “There will always be packages that need to be delivered. It’s unique because it’s brought to you by the drivers. That personalized delivery is going to break through the clutter of those other channels.”

If the test is successful, then UPS plans to expand the program and support it with a full-scale marketing campaign. UPS is currently conducting an ad agency search where it is looking for traditional and digital advertising, media planning, media buying and customer relationship management efforts. Estimates on annual media spending by UPS on its brand is $200 million worldwide and more than $100 million in the U.S.

The UPS Direct to Door program will undoubtedly create more competition for companies who buy mailing lists for traditional direct mail and only the future will say exactly how competitive it will be.

HAVANA, Cuba – Today, officials sat down for the first time together to discuss restoring direct mail service between U.S. and Cuba. This is a small but positive move toward improved relations that comes after a bitter week of accusations over the extension of the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba.

The U.S. delegation is headed by Bisa Williams, who is the current deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. The negotiations are being held at the Cuban capital of Havana. Representatives of the U.S. Postal Service were also present.

Since there is no U.S. embassy in Cuba, Washington maintains a U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a spokeswoman for which is Gloria Berbena. Berbena told The Associated Press that this is the first time State Department officials have traveled to Cuba for talks since late 2002.

The talks seem to be pretty hush hush. The Cuban government has no comment on the talks, not even to confirm they are happening … nor will either side disclose exactly where in Havana the talks are being held.

In August 1963, direct mail service between the U.S. and Cuba was suspended. Washington imposed its embargo a year later. Because of the ban on direct mail, a letter currently mailed between the two nations can only arrive by first going through a third country like Mexico or Canada … with a little bit of luck … maybe. Still, it can sometimes take months for letters to arrive.

The U.S. first attempted to restore direct service in 1999, then tried again in 2000, 2002 and 2008. Cuba finally accepted in May, of this year and agreed to host the talks when representatives from U.S. and Cuba met in New York in July when the bilateral talks on migration were held.

According to the Associated Press, Berbena stated that the talks would be limited only to direct mail service and that the talks were expected to take all day.  Berbena said that the Obama administration sees the talks “as a potential avenue to improve communication between our countries’ peoples.” The outlook does appear to be optimistic for families who are separated by this political divide and for users of mailing lists in general.

WASHINGTON – Talks between the U.S. and Cuba are in the works to resume direct-mail service between the two countries for the first time in nearly half a century. On Sep 1st, 2009, diplomats made the announcement that talks are set to begin on Sept 17, 2009 as part of the Obama administration’s efforts to continue to try to engage the communist country.

Direct mail to Cuba stopped in 1963, and since then mail has had to go through other countries. Diplomats have now arranged to meet in Havana to discuss the renewal of direct mail between the countries to put an end to rerouting direct mail through Canada or Mexico. President Obama would like to improve relations between the U.S. and Cuba. He has taken measures to see if the Cuban leadership is interested in participating. One such step taken involves the support of a recent decision by the Organization of American States to reverse its position in 1962 to suspend Cuba from the 34-country group.

This is also big news for suppliers of mailing lists and for businesses that buy mailing lists. Restoring direct mail service between U.S. and Cuba has been an issue that has thwarted previous presidents, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Previous attempts had been stalled by the Cuban government. Experts say that it would not only be a big step for families that have been divided but also would be a politically critical move. The decision to have the direct mail talks comes just after migration talks in New York in July.

In a Sep 1st article from the Miami Herald, Cuba expert Phil Peters from the Lexington Institute,  a Virginia research center, stated that there is a big difference this time and that Cuba was never able to agree to talk about it and now it seems like Cuba has agreed to talk about it. Peters also said that this is important “Within the context of Cuba and all the divided families,”  and that it was also very symbolically important.

The Miami Herald article also mentions Cuban writer Manuel Vázquez Portal who says that a letter that  should take only three days to arrive can take three or four months.  He also emphasizes that this has bigger meaning because if he wants to communicate to his family in Cuba he is not restricted to calling them by phone or sending them an e-mail.

Vázquez Portal also points out that mail doesn’t get there by magic but that it gets there on ships and planes, and that mail arriving on more ships and more planes has a very important commercial and political meaning. He says, “This is the tip of the iceberg.”

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.

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!