Business Marketing Newswire

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Lists’

GERMANY – On September 1st 2009 the new direct mail opt-in law goes into effect in Germany.  This new law has caused the entire European marketing and data industries to become concerned – similar laws could soon come to the UK. Although the new changes don’t prevent direct mail marketing literature from being sent to potential customers, it will nevertheless restrict businesses from sending it out to the same mass audiences as they have been used to.

The Debate Has Begun

This new law has no effect on direct marketing in the UK currently. Still, debates have begun on websites which discuss whether or not it is a foregone conclusion that all email and direct mail will soon be required to conform to a stricter opt-in policy than is currently enforced. We’d like to contribute to the debate by offering a few points on this issue.

According to UTalkMarketing.com, one person in the marketing and data field, Peter McCormick, co founder and general manager of ExactTarget, feels that the new law is of no concern to organizations whose communications philosophy has the customer at heart. He feels that by having stricter opt-in laws marketers would be guaranteed to only contact warm prospects who were interested in their products and therefore would be more likely to respond.

Cost is a Built-In Incentive For Mailing List Accuracy

While it is generally true that most people don’t want to be flooded with unwanted ‘junk mail’ there is the general idea that out of quantity comes quality. Let’s face it, businesses do have an incentive to use quality mailing lists when sending out direct mail. Each piece costs money and too many dups and too many duds can hammer your ROI. By using an accurate mailing list marketers already have a built-in incentive to make sure their marketing dollar is not wasted.

Direct Mail to Cold Prospects Reaches New Customers

Another point in favor of mass mailing is that without reaching brand new cold contacts, there is no expansion or reach into new territory. Direct mail to cold prospects is an effective way to reach brand new customers who would otherwise not be mailed to if businesses were to only send mailings to ‘warm’ prospects.

Businesses Are Already Required To Remove Names From Mailing Lists

Still, if some prospects absolutely object to receiving unsolicited direct mail, then it would most likely be a waste of money to send a mass mailing to them anyway because they would find it so objectionable that it is unlikely that they would respond to an offer. Most businesses who have any direct mail experience at all have received requests to be removed from future mailings and Postal regulations are already in effect that require this. So it works both ways – the customer is happy and the marketer is happy.

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Direct Mail Forecast

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – A comprehensive forecast of the use of digital printing in the direct mail market has been undertaken and published by INTERQUEST, a market research and consulting firm that serves the digital printing and publishing industry. The document is entitled Digital Printing in Direct Mail: Market Analysis & Forecast (2008-2013) – 260 pages.

The study contains 155 tables and charts and also provides an assessment of the impact of the financial crisis on the direct mail printing business. It was published in January 2009 and complements a previous study from June, 2008 entitled North American Transactional Printing: Market Analysis & Forecast.

This new study is based on in-depth surveys of 40 leading North American direct mail printers and large mailers. The collective volume of the survey participants interviewed for the report account for about 20% of the total digital direct mail impressions produced in North America.

INTERQUEST President, Gilles Biscos, pointed out that direct mail printing has generally been a bright spot in the printing industry for a some years, now. He has seen some dramatic advancements in recent years – the latest generation of equipment in particular – so he and his company felt that the time was right to take a serious look at how digital printing technology was being used in direct mail.

The study is aimed at industry professionals involved in sales and marketing, product management, engineering and product development, application and technical support, market research and strategic planning, sales and technical training, selection and purchase of printing solutions and printing and publishing operations.

Among the topics undertaken in the study are:

• The state of the direct mail market – both current and future
• The use of digital printing in direct mail – including technologies and applications for black-and-white and color
• Important business issues to consider – such as postage, the environment and legislative matters
• The use of laser and ink jet printing in direct mail
• The impact of promotional transactional applications on direct mail inserts
• The impact on direct mail by the current financial downturn

Business who use marketing lists for their direct mail campaigns will certainly be affected by the conclusions arrived by this new study. The study findings suggest that digital providers should be in a stronger position than non-digital providers and should stand a much better chance to weather the current economic downturn. Providers of direct mail lists who use the new digital printing technology will be on the bleeding edge.

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.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

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.

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.

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.