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Posts Tagged ‘Purchase Mailing Lists’

REUTERS – In a report by Ben Gruber on May 22, 2009 he cites that direct mail – or “junk” mail – whether you love it or hate it, is here to stay and that it can help stimulate the troubled U.S. economy.

In his report, Gruber points out that nearly one third of all mail delivered anywhere in the world is U.S. direct mail. While that volume has decreased in 2008, the figure is still staggering. According to the U.S. Postal Service, nearly 100 billion pieces of advertising mail were delivered to U.S. households last year.

Direct Mail Supporters and Detractors

Direct mail has its supporters and its detractors. William Craven works for an environmental group called ForestEthics. He says direct mail is a “pointless waste of natural resources.” Craven says, “Direct mail’s impact on the environment is enormous, especial considering that it’s something that most Americans don’t want and have no user for.” Craven points out that for direct mail there are 100 million trees are logged every year for something people largely don’t want and don’t use. Aside from the logging issue,  he also points out that the carbon footprint for the production and distribution of direct mail equates to that of some 6 million cars on U.S. highways.

But a strong case can be made for direct mail. One of direct mail’s supporters is Matthew Broder from Pitney Bowes, whose company represents the interests of direct mailers. He says that direct mail is recyclable and emits the same amount of carbon as that consumed by Americans when brewing their morning coffee. Broder says that the benefits of direct mail far outweigh the costs. He points out that direct mail very much stimulates economic activity. He says that study after study shows that consumers respond to direct mail. He points out that Pitney Bowes did a study showing that almost half of Americans have started a relationship with a business because of a direct mail piece they received.

According to the Direct Mail Association, the industry generates some two trillion dollars of sales and charitable contributions annually. Gruber points out in his report that although opinions on direct mail vary, most people are not ambivalent. They either love it or hate it.

As one woman being interviewed in the Reuters video report says, “If it can bring attention to a particular product or service, we need to stimulate the economy. We need to have people go out and purchase and buy and so the best thing I think to do is to find really creative, good ways to recycle those papers and to be creative as far as using it best for the environment.”

According to Broder, one thing is for certain – direct mail is not going anywhere, anytime soon. Broder also points out that there are several ways for consumers to decrease and have a say in the type of direct mail they receive. One such online service is dmachoice.org  that has 4 million registered users. Ironically, the association is seriously considering using direct mail to increase their membership.

Mailing Lists Direct is a full service mailing 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, our mailing lists will be able to satisfy all your needs. Call toll free at 800-741-0116.

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.

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.