How to find prospects who are interested in your products/services

Posted July 30th, 2007 by Dr James Pratt

Just to refresh your memory, in my last blog I was talking about direct marketing and specifically, why direct mail is still one of the best values there is to reach your customers and prospects.

I also identified that there were three aspects of success in direct marketing advertising. Now let's spend some time and discuss each of them.

The first of three stepping stones to a successful direct mail campaign is acquisition or development of the right list. Since the main virtue of direct marketing is targeting to specific prospects it makes sense that the selection of those prospects will have a great deal to do with the success of the whole process.

Most experts agree that list selection has a 30% to 50% impact on the overall effectiveness of direct marketing. In selecting a list you want to target people most likely to have an existent interest in what you have to offer as well as some things in common with your present good customers.

These commonalities might be found in age, sex, occupation, income level, neighborhood or geographic area, credit card ownership, family size, magazine subscribed to, or any number of other demographics. These factors are called demographics.

The professional sources you might rent a mailing list from can be incredibly sophisticated in finding or compiling a mailing list of people who conform to your set of desired demographics.

In business-to-business marketing the same sophistication is available. Lists of companies can be obtained by size, sales volume, asset value, number of employees, type of business, geographic area, magazines subscribed to, credit rating and other factors.

Lists of executives, owners, sales managers, personnel managers, purchasing agents, stockholders, or secretaries are also readily available.

List selection can be as simple or sophisticated as you need or want to make it. The owner of an upper class restaurant might want to obtain a mailing list of homeowners within a 50-mile radius of her/his restaurant who have at least one bank credit card.

A private aircraft manufacturer might want the list of corporate officers and business owners with net worth's in excess of a half million dollars all across the country.

As a rule, the more demographic factors you can use in controlling the list, the costlier the list. To a great degree extra money spent in narrowing down the list to fit your desired factors is money well spent.

To find mailing lists you can locate list brokers and sources in your own area by looking in the yellow pages under such categories as mailing lists, mailing services and advertising consultants. There are also many national sources. For a thorough education in the kind of services and lists available go to the main public library in your area and review a copy of a directory.

Small business people should also compile their own mailing lists. For one thing you should maintain an up-to-date mailing list of all your customers and clients. Direct mail to this list can stimulate additional business, introduce new products and services or promote sales or special offers.

In my next blog in just a couple of days, I’ll move on to the second aspect of a successful direct marketing campaign.

Can you guess what it is?

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