One of the most important parts of getting results with a postcard mailing is sending it to the right list.

The best list to use is your list of past customers.  It’s pretty obvious that people who have bought from you before are more likely to buy from you than someone who doesn’t know you from Adam.  Successful businesses are constantly mailing and promoting to their database of existing customers and getting repeat business and even referrals from it. If you’re not doing this, you are losing money.

You can also buy compiled lists to target new prospects.  Of course, it is also vital to reach out to new prospects and the way to get the best results with this is to target a particular group of people. Targeting is focusing your list and your message in order to really get through to the people you are mailing to.  But how do you know who to target?

There are different kinds of lists:

• Business Lists – If you sell your product to other businesses, this is the kind of list that you need to get.  These lists are broken down into what are called Standard Industry Classifications or SIC codes.  In addition, you can choose other selections such as geography (zip codes, county, state or radius from an address) and additional selections such as Annual Revenue, Number of Employees, Years in Business, etc.
  
  
• Consumer Lists – If you sell to individual consumers, you again choose basic geographic selections, plus may add additional selects such as Age, Homeowner/Renter, Male/Female, Household Income, Presence of Children and others.
  
  
• Specialty Lists – Certain types of unusual or more specialized target markets are more difficult to get lists for than others.  For instance: Pool Owners, Parakeet Farms, Homeowners with Mortgages of a Certain Kind, etc.  In many cases they can still be obtained, but these lists can get a bit expensive if they are very difficult to obtain.

To get the right list, it is important that you do some homework on what type of prospect it would be best to target.  You can hire companies to do this market research for you, but an easy and inexpensive way is to do a little bit of in-house research on your own.  Study past invoices. Find out what your top 10 customers for a particular product have in common.  Survey your sales people and find out what kind of person is the easiest to sell or the most profitable.

Perhaps you find that your best past customers are men with an annual income of 60K/year and who are married and own their home.  Perhaps you find that 9 of your 10 biggest clients are retail businesses with more than 20 employees and annual revenue of 2M or more.  Whatever your research tells you, narrow down the exact demographics and then get a list with similar information. 

There is a lot to know about mailing lists and the costs of different lists can vary pretty widely, so if you have any questions, give one of our Account Reps a call at 877-313-BOOM.  They are very experienced and can guide you to the right list for you.