If there's one thing I can't stress enough, it's that your mailing list is the most important part of your mailing campaign. So that your mailing efforts don't go to waste, you need to spend enough time learning about lists of people to mail to. You can get a list that is well-targeted in a few different ways.
Always, the first step is to figure out who you want to reach. Should you market to people or to companies? Imagine that your product is a set of tools for woodworking at home. This should be sold to regular people because it's not good enough for businesses. Good, now we know that there are only 291,324,219 people in the United States. At least three times, your mailing campaign should go to the same people. So you only need to send out 873,972,657 postcards at $0.185 each to get your point across. We need to get even more specific.
So how do you get your list to be shorter? There are many things that can be taken into account, such as age, gender, zip code, annual salary, profession, and number of children. It might take some time to figure out what works best for your product. Don't worry about being politically correct when you decide who to mail to. It is perfectly fine to test lists that might be thought of as "typical." Most of the time, these lists work well. But you can't know for sure until you try them out.
Women over 40 would use a special eye cream, right? You don't have to worry about attracting "older women" or that 40 is no longer old. Even if you have a great idea about a market, you should ALWAYS DO A SMALLER TEST MAILING FIRST. Most test mailings have between 1000 and 1500 names. Once you get good results from a smaller mailing, you can move on to bigger numbers. You might think that 40+ is a good age to start using eye cream, but you might get better results if you wait until 50+. Test test test!
Sometimes, like with our home woodworking tools, you have a product or service that you don't think you can narrow down enough with the usual criteria. You can assume certain things about people who like to work with wood as a hobby: Most likely men who own their own homes, but what else do you know? At this point, you might want to think about using a "managed" list that only you can see. These lists will cost more per name, but they will help you find potential customers much better. You could, for example, order the list of people who get Fine Woodworking Magazine. The cost for each name would be $0.095, which is more than the average cost of $0.05 per name. These names cost almost twice as much, but you can be sure that everyone on the list is interested in woodworking and, as a result, is much more likely to be interested in your product. Some "women over 40" may have wrinkles, while others may look very young and not even be thinking about eye cream yet.
Managed Lists aren't good for every situation, but they can be very helpful when you need to reach a very specific goal. Don't worry about the extra cost; the more targeted names will bring in more money in the long run.
Special mailing lists are used to reach out to a certain type of customer for a certain type of business. This will lead to more customers and a better bottom line in the long run. And isn't that what we all want?
