Mistakes To Avoid In Building A Successful Marketing List
Mistakes To Avoid In
Building A Successful Marketing List
In the dynamic landscape of advertising, where digital channels often dominate, the enduring power of direct mail, particularly postcard advertising, should not be underestimated. In this era of information overload, a well-crafted postcard has the ability to cut through the digital noise and capture the attention of your target audience. However, the effectiveness of any postcard campaign hinges on the quality of your mailing list.
A meticulously curated mailing list not only ensures that your postcards reach the right hands but also serves as the backbone for personalized, targeted communication. It transforms a generic message into a tailored experience, enhancing engagement and conversion rates. In this context, the importance of a good mailing list cannot be overstated; it is the key to unlocking the full potential of postcard advertising and establishing a direct, impactful connection with your audience.
Now that the postcard itself has been designed and is ready for mailing, how do we obtain a good mailing list? Do we buy a list? Do we build a list? What should we look for? How do we know if a mailing list is any good? The quality and potential success of a mailing list depend on a number of factors. In this chapter, we will walk you determining what kind of list is best for your business, and then finding a list that meets your criteria.
Having customers sign up directly on your website is the most surefire way to build a quality list. The first step to building a successful mailing list is defining who you want to reach. There are two distinct categories – Consumers and Business to Business. We’ll deal with these separately.
CONSUMERS
There are three distinct groups you should be targeting with your marketing to consumers:
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Your existing customer list
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Your ‘house prospect’ list
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Your targeted list.
Each needs a message specific to them.
Group #1. Your Existing Customer List
If someone has bought from you once, they are likely to do so again. You should repeatedly mail to your existing customers to inform them of specific offers, products and/or services. While a clear, valuable offer is usually best, this can be anything you reasonably believe they will be interested in based on your knowledge of them and their actual previous buying behavior.
One consistent downfall of small business owners is a failure to manage their customers data and market to them properly. Instead of trying to simply create a sale, we are trying to build and maintain a relationship. In giving you their money, your customers have given you their ultimate vote of confidence. Give them a quality product, excellent service and they will buy from you again and again.
It costs far less money to keep an existing customer than to get a new one.
Look at it as customers being an investment, accruing a lifelong balance in the account of relationship-building. These are the most likely people to purchase your products and/or services because they have paid for them before. It’s not just good for them; it’s good for you.
There are three key rules to follow when marketing to existing customers in your company database:
Collect all of their information
It sounds obvious, but you would be surprised by how many companies do not gather information from their customers or under-utilize what they have. The more information you have about your customers, the more likely you will be able to get in touch with them next time you run a special or want to remind them it’s time to order more products or services.
It is vital to ask for your customers’ email addresses, mailing addresses, telephone number(s) and the person who you last dealt with. If that person is no longer there, then find the new person who is the decision maker. Every company has one and most will give it up pretty easily as long as you’re straight with them. This will make your job easier and quicker when you do want to contact to them.
Don’t treat your customers like prospects
Form letters and generic emails may be easier for you, but don’t make the costly mistake of treating your customers like prospects. It is unflattering and bad form on your part. They’ve spent money with you, and you should treat them appropriately. To avoid this, make sure your database differentiates between people who have placed an order in the past and people who have not. Customers want to feel like you are paying attention to them and if they have already done business with you and are still getting “10% Off for First Time Buyer” postcards, they are going to know that you are not. Remember, if someone doesn’t qualify for an offer you are sending out, do not send it to them.
Don’t let your promotional designs get stagnant
When mailing to customers, you need to mix things up a bit. Sending the same information repeatedly is fine for a while, but soon it will cause them to lose interest. Just keep the overall look the same.
Your mailings should be attention-grabbing and informative, not stale and boring. A postcard to let your database know about a new service you are offering is a smart move, as it keeps your company in the front of their mind. However, if you keep sending the same cards to your customer database, they will lose interest, you are just wasting your money on postage.
One of your main goals should be to educate your existing customers about how your product or service works. As a result, they can get more use out of the entire range of things you offer. This seems complicated, but it can be achieved simply by sending out mailings to make your customers aware of all you can do for them.
Take, for example, a home cleaning company. Not only could they use direct mail postcards to acquire new business, they can use them to effectively market to their current customer database as well. They could offer a wide range of cleaning services to homeowners, and to maximize the return from their mailings of say 3,000 postcards, they could send 2,000 to their current customer database and send the other thousand to prospects in the area.
At the beginning of every season, they could send out a card advertising their season-specific services.
For example:
Spring: “Clean vents, tile and carpets to reduce allergies”
Autumn: “Clean your carpets after a busy summer of visitors and dirty kids running through the house”
Winter: “Dirty carpets promote germs that cause cold and flu symptoms”
This enables them to serve their customers at the highest level, while also strengthening customer loyalty. Brand loyalty is not something your customers owe to you, but something you must earn over time by familiarizing your customers with your products and services.
Sometimes you lose customers because they either forget who they dealt with last time or because they received some kind of promo from one of your competitors and decided to check it out. It’s not your fault; it’s simply human nature. Customers want to do what makes their life easier, not yours. If they are constantly updated about what is available from your company, they won’t spend their valuable time doing research and will be less likely to “shop around.” This will help to control the normal attrition of your database to your competitors.
Simply put, your customers will get to a point where they will read whatever you send them. They need to know it is from your company before they read it. If it doesn’t look like what they are used to getting from you, it may go in the trash without a second look.
Being great at what you do is not always enough to keep your hard-earned customers. With all the competition out there today, you need to be constantly reminding your customers that you are the best at what you do! Direct mail postcards are the best way to give them that reminder.
Group # 2: Your House Prospect List
These are prospects that have inquired about your products and/or services through your own marketing efforts. They are interested in your service but haven’t made the decision to “go for it” yet. They will be the most likely to respond to a special when you offer it to them.
Every time someone contacts your business, you absolutely need to get their contact information. If you make a rule out of this, you will, over time, grow a huge list of prospects that are – or once were – interested in your products or services. This is invaluable for your marketing.
If you don’t follow up, guess how many you’ll close after the first contact?
When a prospect responds to your marketing and contacts your business, you need to have a system in place that will allow you to capture their identity and contact information. This is important, because as we’ve learned above, most leads don’t close on the first contact. New lead source information needs to be compiled somewhere so it can be utilized correctly.
The first step is to gather all of the pertinent information from the prospect. This should include at least the same information as you have for your current customers (name, email, phone, etc.), PLUS how they found out about you and any other industy-specific data needed by you to help make the sale. In addition to growing your house prospect list, this information can be used to calculate all kinds of things that are useful to know. Take a look and see if there are additional questions you should be asking your leads.
Your Opt-In List
This is something you hear people talking about all the time in marketing, but what does it really mean? An “opt-in list” is a list that someone puts themselves on voluntarily, perhaps by signing up for a newsletter or filling out a form on your website.
For many businesses, their website is the number one way for people to find prospects. Luckily, it is fairly easy to figure out what pages should have forms on them. Any high-traffic page on your website should have an opt-in form.
In exchange for your prospects’ information, you need to offer them something valuable, like FREE samples, FREE exclusive content, etc. Filling out a form is nobody’s idea of a good time, so you need to make it worth their while.
Most opt-in forms just request name and email, and maybe a telephone number. Like any list, an opt-in list can be a valuable source to obtain information if used correctly. You have a choice to either call them for follow up information or commence sending them emails. The key to all of these lists is that they are just information; you have to make the best out of that information by sending to these lists repeatedly.
Think of how people get on an opt-in list; they completed a form allowing companies to send them information. They’re not exactly requesting the information from you, just “allowing” it. There’s a big difference.
The most effective list you can mail to is one that prospects signed up for. A newsletter (email or print) is an excellent way to build such a list. You probably won’t have enough records to make a mailing worthwhile for several months, but it’s important to start building as soon as you can.
Nowadays it is so much easier to do this with the advent of the internet. It’s simple for people to find your site, discover your newsletter, type in their email address and forget about it. Every week (or month), you send them a quick, simple newsletter full of facts or tidbits or special offers or breaking news in your industry, and you both win. They get useful information they can choose to read or ignore, and you get one more opportunity to talk about your business.
Create a monthly newsletter sign-up space on your website. Collect only the email address with the promise that the email address will not be sold and that they can cancel any time. For the first few months not only send the newsletter to the list, but also programmed campaigns so that your prospects get used to seeing emails from you. Communicate new ideas, newsworthy events, new employees, humor etc. Just about anything that doesn’t put the recipients under pressure. Ask for feedback in your newsletter. You can offer a submission area where they can vote on how well it looks, the articles it contains, etc. Tweak your newsletter to fit the responses.
Group # 3: Your Targeted List
The third group is composed of people who reasonably should be expected to express interest in your products and/or services, but they have never purchased anything from you, never even inquired about your products and/or services or for that matter whether you even exist.
You can remedy that by contacting them with a series of postcards offering a FREE product trial or information on the benefits of your products and services. If this list is properly selected – and you should make an offer that any reasonable person will find very, very difficult to refuse – then your response rate should be high.
Consumer Lists
Firstly, you need to figure out who your perfect audience is. This is done basically by a selection process.
Let’s say you resurface pools. It’s obvious, your audience will be homeowners with pools. When developing your mailing list you will have to develop a set of criteria that fits your idea of your perfect targeted customer. These criteria are called ‘selects.’ A common set of selects might be:
Geographical – assuming you only work in specific areas. There’s no point mailing to consumers that are outside your business area unless, of course, you want to expand.
Homeowners – Not renters. I trust this is fairly obvious!
Existing homes with pools – There are mailing list businesses that are able to produce lists of such properties.
Home Value – Chances are low value homes will not have a pool. This isn’t definite but logic dictates.
If you have a good mailing list company they should be able to give you guidance as to what’s available. You may have to modify the select criteria depending on what’s available and the numbers that are thrown out by your first pass at this. You might find your list numbers are either too high or too low. It’s unusual to hit your targets at the first pass. There’s also nothing stopping you from reaching out to other list compilers for ideas and options.
Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)
EDDM is a post office service that allows you to reach potential customers across an entire mailing route. It’s a cost-effective way to get your message to a large base, as it provides a cheaper postage rate than first-class or even standard bulk mailing rates, and you don’t need to build or buy a mailing list to use it.
It can be a great option for small businesses looking to target specific areas. Like the name implies, Every Door Direct Mail sends the same printed piece to every residence and/or business on a specific mail route. Because you’re mailing to every recipient, and, as already mentioned, you don’t need to provide a specific mailing list with names and addresses. Instead, you’ll select the carrier route(s) you’d like to mail to using the USPS Mapping Tool, and your printer will address each piece to ‘Local resident” using the USPS approved indicia.
One way to decide if EDDM is a good fit for your company is to answer these questions:
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Do my products/services appeal to everyone?
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Could anyone, within a specific geographic area, be a potential customer?
If the answer to these two questions is ‘YES’ then EDDM maybe for you.
Some businesses that make a great fit for EDDM campaigns:
Restaurants
Landscapers
Supermarkets
Department Stores
Electronics Stores
Banks
Insurance Agencies
Real Estate Agencies
Healthcare Providers
Once you’ve decided which carrier route(s) you want to use, you then prepare for your mailing. The good thing about EDDM postcards is that the design, writing and call to action are the same as regular direct mailing postcards. All you have to do is to bundle the postcards as instructed by the post office and drop them off. The post office takes care of everything else. There is still a need to track replies as they can be considered as new customers.
Home-Improvement Companies
Furniture Stores
BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS
Finding a good B2B list that caters to what your business offers might seem difficult. Perhaps you offer something very specific and don’t want to waste money sending postcards to companies who would not need your services. Let’s say you manufacture double-panel windows used in high-rise buildings. You’re not going to want to mail to contractors who specialize in building single-story homes. Both fall under the umbrella of “construction,” but obviously this is not your target market. To make sure you’re not wasting money by using the wrong mailing list and sending to the wrong people, you can refer to a coding system implemented by the U.S. Government called the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
What Is NAICS and Why Is It so Important?
An NAICS code is minimally a six-digit numerical code that is issued to businesses by the U.S. government in order to organize and identify all the different industries in the nation. This way, data can be compiled and analyzed about these industries and the government will have uniformity of statistical information collected by the various federal and state agencies and private organizations.
The United States Department of Labor defines ten industries:
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Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing
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Mining
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Construction
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Manufacturing
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Transportation, Communications, Electric, Gas and Sanitary Services
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Wholesale Trade
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Retail Trade
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Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate
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Services
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Public Administration
Each of these industries have between two and twenty subdivisions, and each of those can have upwards of ten or twenty further divisions. This makes it possible to find a list that caters to exactly what your business needs.
You can refer to www.osha.gov/pls/imis/sic_manual.html for more information.
Reading an NAICS Code
The first two digits of the code identify the major industry group, the third digit identifies the sub-industry group, and the fourth digit identifies the exact industry.
Why are we telling you all this? Mailing list compilers and companies that gather data about businesses use NAICS codes to sort them. Sure, if you want ALL businesses in a certain gross volume range, then you won’t need to know the NAICS code.
But perhaps you run a dental lab and you’re an expert at a certain kind of bridge. It’s obvious you want to promote to dentists. But maybe this particular bridge you specialize in is only used by dental surgeons. There is one code for “dentists,” in general, and another for “dental surgeons,” in particular. This allows you to get very focused in your search. You wouldn’t want to be sending to businesses that wouldn’t be interested in what you’re selling. The more focused you are, the better your results.
So, bottom line – when you’re compiling criteria for your list, NAICS codes are an indispensable component. It’s attention to detail!
The Formula For Your Mailings
To start with, decide how many mailings you want to do. If you’re currently not doing any mailings, a good amount to send for acquiring new business is 1,000 pieces per month. This amount always pays off if done consistently, but there is a more organized and mathematical way to figure this out:
1. Do a test mailing.
Put a code on the postcards so that you can track the responses. Each time you send a mailing, even if it’s a design you’ve used before, should have a different code. Without this code, tracking will be much more difficult.
2. Start to gather information.
When anyone calls make sure the person answering the call asks, “How did you hear about us?” If “postcard” is the answer, then proceed with the next question: “Can you give me that marketing code you see there on your postcard, please?”
3. Note down all responses and where they came from.
Do this regardless of whether you think they’re qualified (someone unqualified today may become qualified down the road – never disregard an incoming lead).
4. Evaluate how many leads did you close off of that mailing?
5. Determine the Income.
How much did you bring in due to that test mailing.
6. Repeat.
Do this for at least three months.
7. Work out what size mailing you need to do to
How large of a mailer do you need to send out to achieve your target profit? If the 1,000 mailing yielded 50% of the profit you’re looking, for you know that you’ll have to double it to achieve your target.
Keep mailing, no matter what. If your sales numbers slow down, mail even more in order to make up for it. If you stop mailing, your leads will dry up and result in even lower sales.
Finding a Mailing List Company
There are a lot of mailing list companies out there and you have to be careful which one you choose. A poor company will make life difficult and will make interpretation of result uncertain. Here’s some of the questions you need to ask to try to make sure you’re dealing with a professional outfit.
“Do you guarantee deliverability?”
The answer should be “yes.” (Deliverability is the ability of the mail piece to be successfully delivered to the prospect)
“What amount of deliverability do you guarantee?”
You should agree to no less than 90% deliverability.
“Will you refund postage on bad addresses as well as the cost of each bad record?”
This is a tough one… 10% is the max on bad addresses as an industry standard. Over the 10% we do refund postage on the bad addresses as well as the cost of the bad address records. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find a list company that will do this, but you might as well ask.
“Can I use the list over and over again?”
Again, there will be an up-charge for this because quality companies will charge for unlimited use of a list. These compilers are constantly updating their data and there is a cost to that activity. When a random list broker says “Sure, use it as much as you want,” I’m always suspicious. Who compiled that list? In my experience, all the major compilers charge more for unlimited usage.
Don’t just buy the cheapest out there, though. Make sure you get the right answers to the above questions. Remember, postage is the most expensive part of any mailing, and if the list is old and you get more than 10% undeliverable returns, you are literally throwing money away.
Other Sources
Subscriber Lists
Magazine publishers will normally rent out their list. Before you commit, question them on whether they’ll allow you to use the list over and over. Often times they have a one-time usage clause in their contract. If so, look elsewhere. Using a list only one time is useless and goes against our repeat rule. Plus if they only allow you to use it one time and you have to repurchase for additional use, it may get very expensive. In addition, the publisher is constantly updating their list and so you’ll be mailing to new people plus not mailing to ones that you’ve already mailed to. Interpreting your results becomes extremely difficult. Bottom line – stay away.
Affiliate Companies: Sharing
Today, more and more companies are willing to offer the lists they’ve worked so hard to build – for a price. But if you can let them do the hard work of trial and error, you can benefit, and the investment you make in that list is a small price to pay. Here are a few examples of this type of list, otherwise known as affiliate companies:
Say you’re a mortgage broker: If you’re selling mortgages and work with a particular title company, they will sometimes GIVE you their list of clients with address information, loan amount and length of loan. Sometimes even the lender is included. They, in turn, want all your loans closing with them so, in exchange for that, they may share the data they have.
Say you’re a florist: You may want to use the recent mailing list of a bridal boutique. Maybe you can provide flowers at a trunk show in exchange for a monthly list of new gown customers. Maybe there is a caterer you sometimes work with that will trade customer lists with you. The point is that you need to get creative – who may want to use your customer list and also has a good product or service but doesn’t compete with you? Trade with them.
I normally don’t like affiliate lists as they’re too hit and miss and the repeat mantra that we preach isn’t possible to follow. It’s ok as an adjunct to a mailing if you have a great giveaway.
Finally, don’t leave it to the list company to figure any of this out for you. They don’t know your business the way you do. Compilers normally don’t ask questions to determine if the list you’re ordering is what you really need to have success with your campaign. You need to understand this material so your list is actually comprised of businesses likely to purchase your product or service, and not just some variance of that industry.
This is vital. Your list will make or break your campaign. The more understanding YOU have about how these lists are compiled and where the data comes from, the more power you will have over the results of your campaign.
