Archive for January, 2009
How Can You Ensure That Your Mailing Lists are Still Reaching Your Target Audience?
1) List Cleansing
The need to clean your mailing list is ever present. UK consumers and businesses are in a constant state of flux, and have more and more opportunities to decline receiving direct marketing messages through various suppression files.
For example over 60% of UK households and more than 55% of businesses have registered telephone numbers with the Telephone Preference Service, in order to block unwanted sales calls. Around 3 out 5 unchecked sales or marketing phone calls to consumers or businesses will now be to a TPS or CTPS registered number.
In addition, the consumer environment in particular is constantly on the move, as people move house and leave home. In the UK 3,200,000 people move house every year – up to 7,000 every day. Approximately 11% of addresses are mailed incorrectly each year. Plus the latest official figures show that there were 572,192 deaths registered in 2006 across the United Kingdom – it is both unethical and costly to continue mailing the deceased with your marketing messages.
Consumer or business or consumer addresses should be checked against the Mailing Preference Service (MPS) Quarterly in order to meet obligations, alongside a check against the relevant Telephone Preference Service (TPS) for consumers or Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) for businesses.
2) Test Marketing
Once your list has been cleansed it is a good idea to trial your mailing list. Sending your mailings to a test group of 100, with a follow up telephone call a shortly afterwards will ensure that you are sending your information to the relevant people.
This may seem time consuming in the short term, but longer term it can save your business money and avoid wasting time and energy. By the time you’ve factored in the cost of postage, list rental, and printing, direct mail can be a costly business – if you get it wrong.
It is also worth using this opportunity to test your direct mail campaign. Businesses can think about testing promotional offers and the power of your letter. The best way to avoid an expensive mistake is to test the main aspects of your direct mail campaign well before your mailing letter even hits the postal system.
Summary
Don’t forget that if you are using direct marketing to reach either existing or potential customers, the quality and accuracy of your data needs to be spot on to avoid wastage and get the best possible results, so make sure you invest in data cleansing and quality lists from only the most reputable of sources. Never be tempted to cut corners by using out of date lists or buying in low cost poorly targeted databases.
By: Steve Sellwood
About the Author:
Steve Sellwood of http://www.selectabase.co.uk, one of the UK’s leading independent direct marketing list providers. Selectabase provide a range of marketing lists for business and consumer markets, as well as affordable data cleansing services.
Postcard Mailing Secrets for Newbies and Oldies
That’s the strength of postcard and mailing is something that you should explore and take advantage of. By coordinating every detail in your campaign, you can have an effective postcard mailing campaign that would reward you with a ROI or return on investment.
In order to do this, businesses both old and new should look into and study their markets closer. Ask yourself certain questions that you haven’t asked before but you should ask now. Open yourself to more possibilities and see how your products can take a chance at certain opportunities in the trends and the shifting pull of the market.
Market Questions
These helpful questions would help you conjure a message that is not only persuasive but effective in closing a sale as well. Use them as a guide to help you hone in on your target audience.
1. Are the people who you expect to buy your products or acquire your services the ones who really do?
2. Have any of your products been bought or used in a different fashion, other than what you had intended it to be?
3. Have a significant amount of people, who didn’t use your products before, began purchasing them?
4. How else does your market see your products? Do they perceive any other values for your product
5. Do you appeal to more niches?
Persuasive Tools
Postcards and postcard mailing are your tools in connecting to your audience. Moreover, it is your gateway to introducing your products, getting promotions out, and building up your brand.
1. Use postcards in coordination with other print materials that you hand out. Make it a portable insert in your newsletters, press kits, magazines and more.
2. Accessorize and personalize the products you send out with postcards as a greetings card or thank you note.
3. Create postcards with a double purpose – a business reply form, survey form, or order form.
4. Create cut-out coupons that your recipients can keep and use in the future, create perforations that would allows them to tear a part of the postcards as stubs, and better yet, integrate a call to action that would allow them to keep and carry such postcards to your stores.
5. Mailing services provides you with an advantage to explore the demographics and location of people who would be interested in knowing and purchasing your products.
6. Mailing list allows you to tap into a market in accordance with your strategies – whether you want to reach out to a local market, interstates, or nationwide.
Make your postcards and postcard mailing become the tools that would propel your business to more activities and sales. And while it may not always bring in the results faster, it is an affordable tool you have used to further your media mileage by advertising all at the same time
By: Carla San Gaspar
About the Author:
More topics on postcard mailing can be found at Postcard Printing – U Printing
How a Direct Marketing Mailing List Can Help Your Business
A direct marketing mailing list allows your business to have greater capability in generating sales leads. Such a list allows you to be able to promote your products to others relatively easily and efficiently. This is extremely important for start-up companies, as often, these companies have yet to establish a firm footing in the market. Given this, a direct marketing mailing list would allow you to raise awareness to a potential customer base, on the various types of products and services which you are offering. For instance, you could send out promotional mailers to the addresses of people in your list, to raise awareness on the products and services which you are offering. In either case, exposing a greater part of the general public to the products and services that your company is offering would definitely result in potentially greater sales volume.
In addition, a direct marketing mailing list would enable you to provide updates to your customers on any new products or services which you may be offering. Launched a new line of products recently? Restructured your business? Let people know! It would simply not do for people to come inquiring about a discontinued product from time to time. Instead, keep your customers in the loop by letting them know what is your company doing. Awareness of the latest products that your company is offering would mean business when customers have the need for such a product.
Moreover, most direct marketing mailing lists provide by list companies would often consist of individuals who are more likely to make purchases. This means that your return on investment would be potentially higher. What is referred to here by definition of investment would include factors such as printing your mailers and getting people to do the mailing jobs for you. In essence, it’s all the costs associated with the marketing campaign itself. In most cases, listing companies employ a wide variety of selection criteria before placing a particular individual’s name down onto the direct marketing mailing list.
Finally, the use of a direct marketing mailing list as a method of marketing is something relatively cheap as compared to other means of marketing such as advertising. Given that costs are lower; this means that business owners would be able to conduct more frequent marketing campaigns in order to increase sales volume.
Indeed, there are many ways how a direct marketing mailing list can help your business. The methods listed above are by no means exhaustive. However, it is best to constantly evaluate the effectiveness of the actual sales generated from each mailing list in order to obtain a mailing list that provides you with nothing but the best sales leads. Doing so would enable you to score spectacular results in your company’s sales drive.
By: Chris Burns
About the Author:
Secrets of Million Dollar Sales Letters – Mail Campaign
All winning sales letters “talk” to the prospect by creating an image in the mind of the reader. They set “the scene” by appealing to a desire or need; and then they flow smoothly into the “visionary” part of the sales pitch by describing in detail how “wonderful” life will be and, how “good” the prospect is going to feel after he’s purchased your product. This is the “body or guts” of a sales letter.
Overall, a winning sales letter follows a time-tested and proven formula: 1) Get his attention 2) Get him interested in what you can do for him 3) Make him desire the benefits of your product so badly his mouth begins to water 4) Demand action from him – tell him to click the right button or send for whatever it is you’re selling without delay – any procrastination on his part might cause him to lose out. This is called the “AIDA” formula (Attention, Interest, Desire and
Action) – it works.
On your website, your sales page should be the length of what it would be
if were doing a mailing, or longer if you’re using bullets to emphasize benefits to build the desire. Of course on the Internet you don’t have to worry about letterhead stationery or the cost of postage, which is a considerable savings. If, however, you want to also do a mailing campaign then the following would apply. The sales letters in mailings that pull in the most sales are almost always two pages with 1 1/2 spaces between lines. For really big ticket items, they’ll run at least four pages. – on an 11 by 17 sheet of paper folded in half. If your sales letter is only two pages in length, there’s nothing wrong with running it on the front and back of one sheet of 8 1/2 by 11 paper. However, your sales letter should always be on letterhead paper – your letterhead printed, and including your logo and business motto if you have one.
Regardless of the length of your sales letter, it should do one thing, and that’s sell, and sell hard! If you intend to close the sale, you’ve got to do it with your sales letter. You should never be “wishy-washy” with your sales letter. You do the actual selling and the closing of that sale with your sales letter – any brochure or circular you send along with in your mailing will just reinforce what you say in the sales letter.
There’s been a great deal of discussion in the past few years regarding just how long a sales letter should be. A lot of people are asking: Will people really take the time to read a long sales letter? The answer is a simple and time-tested yes indeed! Surveys and tests over the years emphatically prove that “longer sales letters” pull even better than the shorter ones, so don’t worry about the length of your sales letter – just make sure that it sells your product for you!
The “inside secret” is to make your sales letter so interesting, and “visionary” with the benefits you’re offering to the reader, that he can’t resist reading it all the way through. You break up the “work” of reading by using short, punchy sentences, underlining important points you’re trying to make, with the use of subheadlines, indentations and even the use of a second color, and leaving lots of white space around it. On your website, the sales letter should run down the middle of the page so the viewer doesn’t have to keep adjusting the screen to see the whole sentence. This is very distracting and more apt to send that client to another website than losing patience reading a long letter.
Relative to the brochures and circulars you may want to include in your mailing with your sales letter – providing the materials you’re enclosing are of the best quality, they will generally reinforce the sale for you. But, if they are of poor quality, look cheap and don’t compliment your sales letter, then you shouldn’t be using them. Another thing, it will definitely classify you as an independent home worker if you hand-stamp your name/address on these brochures or advertising circulars instead of having them printed.
Whenever possible, and so long as you have really good brochures to send out, have your printer run them through his press and print your name/address – even your telephone number and company logo – on them before you send them out. The thing is, you want your prospect to think of you as his supplier – the company – and not as just another independent entrepreneur. Sure, you can get by with less expense but you’ll end up with fewer orders and in the end, less profits.
Another thing that’s been bandied about and discussed from every direction for years is whether to use a post office box number or your street address. Personally, I don’t like Post Office Boxes in a business address – because it transmits an aura of instability or temporary location. If your business is run from home, get a mail box from a post box vendor that has a street address. Then your address looks like, 1234 Willow Lane, #567, Your Town, and the box number could appear to the reader as a Suite number. However, if you live in a remote area where your address is 7890 Main St., RFD 42, Box 123, Your Town, then you have no choice but to include both your post office box number, AND, your street address on your sales letter. When doing it strictly for your website, put your street address, telephone number, and email address at the bottom of the page. More than likely, the customer will contact you by email, but it conveys dependability if that Internet buyer sees that you’re willing to give your address. This kind of open display of your honesty will give you credibility and dispel the thought of you being just another “fly-by-night” mail order company in the mind of your prospect.
Above all else, you’ve got to include some sort of ordering page or coupon if you’re mailing. The coupon has to be as simple and as easy for the prospect to fill out and return to you as you can possible make it. The order page on your website should already be filled out, with perhaps just the shipping left to choice. If your product is an eBook or software to be instantly downloaded, then you don’t have any options to be chosen. A great many sales are lost because this order coupon is just too complicated for the would-be buyer to follow. Don’t get fancy! Keep it simple, and you’ll find your prospects responding with glee.
Should you or shouldn’t you include in your mailing a self-addressed reply envelope? There are a lot of variables, as well as, pros and cons to this question. Overall, when you send out a “winning” sales letter to a good mailing list, a return reply envelope will increase your response tremendously.
Tests of late seem to indicate that it isn’t that big a deal or difference in responses relative to whether you do or don’t pre-stamp the return reply envelope. Again, the decision here will rest primarily on the product you’re selling and the mailing list you’re using. Our recommendation is that you experiment – try it both ways – with subsequent mailings and decide for yourself from there.
By: Nicholas Tan
About the Author:
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Direct Mailing List Tips Self Publishers & Business Owners Must Know
First of all, generally, you rent, not buy mailing lists. They remain in the ownership of the mailing list company and are usually not for sale.
Many business owners rent lists but don’t use them right away, which is a mistake. Most lists change considerably in 30 days or less. Some lists, like mailing lists of public libraries, prisons, hospitals, hospital gift shops, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, universities, daily newspapers, TV stations and radio stations will have very few changes. They are fairly stationary so not as likely to move. Bookstore lists, new age bookstores lists, organization lists, specialty lists, MLM lists and business mailing lists may have a high rate of return. To avoid a lot of returns, rent the selected lists just prior to making your mailing.
Be careful about renting any mailing list that goes to individuals: consumer mailing lists, seniors mailing lists, residential mailing lists, homeowners mailing lists and opportunity seekers mailing lists, for example. With 20% of the population moving every year you may get significant returns.
But do expect some returns. As often as we mail using lists, we always get returns (called ‘nixies’ in the trade) from the post office. People move, forwarding orders expire, people expire, post office boxes close, and businesses close their doors.
Mailing list management and upkeep is expensive. It takes a lot of time and labor for companies to compile, add to, clean and mail to their lists and other necessary maintenance. They also use expensive mailing list software programs which can have costly bugs of their own.
To help you plan ahead, before you order your mailing lists, ask when you can expect the order to arrive. This can vary considerably from company to company. Some companies can take up to two weeks or more.
Mailing lists can usually be ordered in at least three formats – peel and stick (pressure-sensitive) labels or Cheshire (18 pound, spreadsheet-size computer paper-less common these days) or on a floppy disk (used less often these days) or CD. You order peel and stick labels if they’re going to be affixed to your mailing piece by hand. Or if you know how to import the lists you can order them on CD. If your mailing house is going to do your mailing they’ll probably prefer the floppy disk or CD – check with them on this before you order.
Mailing houses used to require the Cheshire format instead of peel and stick labels before the advent of computer technology and CD ROM. They have machines that cut the printed Cheshire sheets into labels and glue them to the envelopes. When ordering lists on CD, specify the format you want to use for conversion, usually ASCII comma-delimited. You must know how to import it when you get the disk though. The mailing lists will always be for one-time use only even if they’re on a CD or disk. And some mailing list companies offer instant downloads of lists.
Also if a mailing house is going to do your mailing, they may want the labels to be merged if there is more than one list, or bar-coded, which will save considerably on postage. If you can’t answer their technical questions, have your mailing house call your mailing list rental company to work out the final details.
Consider the cost to mail out your mailing piece. You might want to test a small number on the list first if you have an expensive or heavy package.
When you do mailings First Class, you’ll get returns from the post office at no additional charge. If you mail Third Class (bulk mail), you won’t get returns. They will be tossed out at the post office, UNLESS you’ve printed ‘Return Service Requested’ on the envelope. Then each return (nixie) will cost additional postage (based on first class), or ‘Change Service Requested’ (cost based on piece regardless of weight.) Make sure to check current costs with the post office because they change their rates AND rules periodically.
Always send any nixies back to your mailing list company, even if there aren’t enough for a credit, which is almost always offered. This is a good practice especially if you plan to mail again to the same list soon. They usually have a time limit as to when they can accept the nixies for credit because the lists you rented will become outdated fairly soon.
When you contract to rent a list, some mailing list companies may require a sample mailing piece. This is so the company can determine if you’re mailing a competitive or objectionable piece.
The business of mailing list rentals is based on the honor system to a degree, but this honor system also has a built-in alarm: owners protect their data by planting decoy names (seeds) in the mailing lists they rent. If a renter contracts to use a list on a one-time basis and uses it a second time, the decoy will receive the unauthorized mailing and report the misuse to the list owner. The decoys are often friends or relatives of the staff of the companies. Also, many mailing list companies employ companies that specialize in tracking or monitoring mailings to detect any misuse. Since decoys are different for each list order, the renter who abuses a contract is easy to trace.
Mailing lists are protected by copyright and trade secret law. Any violation of a list agreement is strictly upheld by the courts. Once a list rental contract has been broken, the list owner has legal recourse to sue for compensatory and punitive damages. Punitive damages could amount to as much as three times the value of the list and more.
All list owners have good reason to be so protective of their data. List rental is a multibillion-dollar business. There are literally thousands of lists available for rental in the United States alone.
If all else fails, you can enlist the help of a mail list broker. Brokers usually collect their fees from the mailing list company. Check this out first.
In any case caveat emptor! In any case you can reap rewards handsomely from sending out fliers, press releases, press kits, review copies of books and other materials via the direct mailing lists you choose.
These tips and trade secrets should help self publishers, book publishers, entrepreneurs, home based or work-at-home and small business owners make better decisions when working with mailing lists, mailing list rentals and mailing list companies.
By: Helen Hecker
About the Author:
http://www.TwinPeaksPress.com