Building a Consumer Mailing List

January 23rd, 2013

List brokers will customize a list based on your specifications that can target your ideal customer – the individuals or businesses most likely to buy from you. Using specific search criteria such as age, gender, income, households with children, etc. can put you in front of your target audience. Criteria selections are virtually endless, and if you put some thought into it, your list will deliver results!

List selection is key – all the fancy graphics and the most beautifully created sentences won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t carefully select the people on your mailing list. If you’re selling senior products, you don’t want to target 23 year old people. If you’re trying to reach households with children, is there a specific age group you want to target (i.e. pre-school, elementary school, high school, college students)? Do you want the household to have a specific income; furthermore, do you want the income to include one person or two? These are critical issues when choosing a list that will work for your business.

Tighten your mailing list as much as possible to be sure it’s tailored to your needs. It difficult to make people believe they need your product and even harder to convince them they need it now. If you’ve researched your target customer, and purchase the appropriate list, you have a higher chance of reaching your potential customs instead of the trash can.

List response can be confused with list deliverability. A list can be 100% deliverable, but you many not get a high response rate. Many people automatically assume that it wasn’t a good list when, in fact, the mailing list was targeted to the wrong market – the key to making the list work for you is knowing who your target audience is!Statistics show the average rate of response for direct mail is 1-2%. If the mail piece is eye-catching, has a call to action, and the timing of the mail piece is correct, we’ve seen response rates as high as 8-10%.