Direct Mail

How To Create The Best Direct Mail List

Your direct mail list is one of the 3 pillars.

If you have a bad list you are wasting your money on direct mail. Many times we have customers that need help with targeting their list to create an effective campaign. Based on these requests we have come up with a direct mail list guide. Are you ready to create a better direct mail list?

Direct Mail List creation guide:

Knowledge

What do you know about your customers? The more you know the better you can group and target them. If your current data only has your company purchase history, consider profiling your list. This can give you valuable insight into your customers and therefore who best to target as prospects.

Segmentation

The best way to get the results you need from your direct mail is to group like people together for each offer you have. Segment your data and any data you purchase to maximize the offer response.

Current

Make sure that you have current addresses. People are constantly moving and most of the time they will not notify you. You can run you data through the post office using their NCOA platform to update your addresses to the current ones they have. Depending on the age of your data you may get some back that are flagged as moved but no address is available. You can just drop them as they will not get to your customers.

Duplicates

Most people are running a dedupe to remove duplicate records before they mail, but it still should be mentioned here. You should not send duplicates. There are a ton of different software packages that can help you or we can do it for you. One thing to consider is if you want to send your mail to more than 1 person in the home. Depending on what you are sending you may or may not want to.

If you use all 4 steps you will keep a very clean direct mail list. This means that you are now ready to focus on the other 2 pillars to send out a great direct mail campaign. Remember that you can purchase lists to augment your customer files. When you have purchased a well targeted list based on who your best customers are you can expect a better response rate. Sending to the right people with a good offer and a great design will give you the advantage in the mailbox. Have you used customer knowledge to highly target your direct mail pieces? How did it work for you?

Need help? Contact us today! We are glad to help!