The best response rate comes from mailing to those who are already familiar with your business or organization. This can be your customers (active and inactive), prospects who have contacted you for some reason, and referrals from customers or friends.
A list you put together yourself consisting of customers, prospects and referrals is known as a house list. A house list can be compiled from customer purchase transactions, donor records, membership rosters and similar sources. In general, a house list produces a higher response rate than a purchased list because so many of the individuals on the list already know who you are.
If you want to expand your house list by adding a purchased list, a good technique is to submit the house list for data append. This adds demographic information (such as household income, gender of the head of household, home value, presence of children for residences and annual sales volume, number of employees, and SIC code for businesses). Data append creates a profile of those on your house list; then the profile can be used to select prospects whose profile is a match.
Using this technique, you'll have a targeted mailing list of customers with whom you have an established business relationship and prospects whose demographic characteristics match those of your customers. If the list consists of businesses, you can further refine the list by searching the Internet for the business's web site and gathering additional information to help you personalize a sales message.
As you prepare your mail list, keep this fact in mind: the mail list accounts for 60% of the response rate in any direct mail marketing campaign.
Whether you need a new list or help cleaning up your list, we can help. Give us a call at (719) 591-0790 or email info@lxprinting.com with you need help with your list.
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