One of the greatest features of direct marketing is your ability to decide who should receive your direct marketing pieces. This allows you to be very focused, unlike some other media, where everyone sees or hears your message.
By selecting the correct target audience, the benefits of direct marketing are immeasurable, not only saving you money (by not mailing to those with no interest), but also by optimizing your chances of success with those that do receive your materials.
So, where are your best prospects? Sometimes you do not have to look very far. In other cases it is a matter of looking further afield, with a pre-defined profile in mind. The most common sources include:
- Surveying existing customers
- Acquiring mailing lists that match specific criteria
- Targeting letter carrier walks where demographics best match your criteria
- Business and Association Directories
Surveying Existing Customers
It is surprising how many people fail to effectively cross sell to their existing clients when introducing a new product or service. Why? Well, it often results from a lack of key fields to identify customers that would be most interested in a new product or service, overlooking valuable data that might be available. The problem might also stem from stale data that cannot be relied on.
If you have a customer database with current, reliable data, it can be a wonderful resource for seeking out new opportunities.
If you do not have a marketing database, it can be a good investment to set up a few key fields to identify the probability of interest in your primary product or service groupings. The keys here are a) not to go overboard with too many fields and b) ensuring that there is someone that is responsible and accountable for keeping the information up to date.
New Prospects
If you're looking to expand your customer base, then obviously you want to get your message into the hands of people who are not currently your customers. Still, even here, your existing customer list can be a valuable asset, as it can help you find commonalities between your existing customers and ultimately draw up a profile of your ideal prospect.
This profile reflects the type of individual that you want to target, and can be used in a number of different ways to help improve the overall focus of your direct marketing efforts.
There are several sources that you can use to acquire new prospects. Some of these include:
- List Rentals
- Canada Post's GeoPost Plus System
- Business and Association Directories
List Rentals
There are a number of different list brokers out there, the best of which should be able to produce lists based on a wide range of demographics. As such, if you provide these brokers with your ideal profile, they should be able to come back with a mailing list of individuals who best match that profile.
These kinds of lists are a great way to get your message out. Not only do they allow you to more closely target your ideal prospect, there are also a number of other benefits:
- You'll have an address, and addressed pieces tend to garner more attention than unaddressed pieces
- Individual-specific data really opens the door for different types of variable imaging and advanced personalization
Before contacting a list broker, here are a few things that you should know:
1. Most lists are rented, not purchased. Some lists can be used only once, whereas some brokers will allow a full year's use of the list.
2. Most lists are seeded. That means that the owner of the list has placed names on it so that they can track the usage of the list, as the "seeded" pieces will be delivered to known associates, often right across the country.
3. Most lists have contact names, but some do not. If you want to use personalization, such as "Dear Dave", you will need contact names. Also, if you are planning to use this type of personalization try to have records with first initial only pulled from the list. A greeting of "Dear D." is sure to turn your prospect off.
GeoPost Plus
GeoPost Plus is often used with Canada Post's Unaddressed Admail service to target neighbourhoods with a higher percentage of consumers and businesses that match certain criteria.
I do want to note that there is a substantial difference between "flyer delivery" and Canada Post's Unaddressed Admail service, and comparing one against the other is like comparing "apples to oranges".
First of all, Canada Post is the only organization that has the keys to condominium and apartment mail boxes. As such, many flyers that are to be delivered in local newspapers never make it past the lobby, because carriers are not permitted to go door to door within most multiple dwelling buildings. That's not a good investment.
Next, there is the Canada Post GeoPost Plus system, which can be used at several different levels. In its simplest form when targeting the consumer market, you may want to find neighbourhoods based on income levels, age groups, educational levels or households with children. Canada Post has criteria beyond these, as well as access to psyte clusters which identify areas with common lifestyles.
Although the business side is not quite as robust, the GeoPost Plus system can help you to target business neighbourhoods based on number of employees, annual income and industry type.
Regardless of whether you are targeting consumers or businesses, the good news is that the GeoPost Plus services are free when you use the Canada Post Unaddressed Admail service.
Business and Association Directories
There are many types of directories that list business or associations names, addresses, telephone numbers and primary contacts. Some of these are in hardcopy form only and it can be a daunting task to manually enter these.
Additionally, the world wide web is literally full of names, address and primary contacts, although some business and organizations tend not to list contact names. In any event, most of this information can be gathered fairly quickly by simply cutting and pasting it into a spreadsheet. Also, if you have any programmers on staff, a simple program can sometimes be written to facilitate the capture of the data, depending on the structure and layout of the web pages.
Although it can be a lot of work to gather information from directories, it can be a good investment when these businesses and associations are viable prospects for your products and services. Also, once gathered, you can mail to them as often as you wish.
Testing
Another nice thing about direct marketing is that you do not have to go "whole hog" all at once. If you are looking to do a mass mailing of 25,000 pieces, you might start with 1,000 to test one or more mailing designs or offers. From here, you can determine which pieces are giving you the best returns and, in turn, drive better results for the larger mailing of 25,000 pieces. It is a great way to actually save while maximizing your direct marketing ROI.
Interested in learning more about how you could improve your direct marketing efforts through more focused targeting? Contact us today to discuss how we can help you improve your targeting.