Direct Marketing Mailing List

One of the most important elements in running an effective and efficient direct marketing process online is probably having a good direct marketing mailing list. It is of utmost importance that you identify and reach the right customers for your enterprise if you want to be successful in selling your products or services.

The question is how you come up with this important list of potential buyers. How do you get the contacts that you need to compile such a mailing list?

In order to be able to produce a really useful direct marketing mailing list you need to consider a number of elements. We ought to mention the sources (internal and external), the way you segment the list, and the criteria you need to keep in mind when designing the list, as well as the legislation and regulations on personal data. Regarding the sources for your list, you could use internal ones to compile a mailing list of both current and potential customers. Another thing you can do is rent or buy existing lists from other sources such as brokers, publishers or organizations that offer such lists.

Internally, you may find necessary information for your direct marketing mailing list from areas such as: customer records, warranty records, service records, records of former customers, market research surveys, customer correspondence or business information library. You can obtain a wealth of contact data from sources outside your company. External sources include the following: summaries or reports on consumer surveys, published surveys, specialized magazines and yearbooks, local telephone or chamber of commerce directories. Just make sure they are in the public domain.

Your direct marketing mailing list should contain, first of all, names, jobs, titles, addresses and telephone numbers. In order to have a really effective list to meet business needs, you must make sure you reach the proper customer segment of the population. To obtain this, you will have to refine and improve your initial list by adding extra information on the existing contacts. This information should be related to lifestyle patterns, buying patterns, hobbies, number of family members and the like. Thus, you will create a more complete profile for every prospect.

Beyond this phase you will be able to divide the contacts into different categories and, thus, get sub-lists. It then becomes easy to personalize the marketing messages to quite a detailed extent and send them to those who are most likely to be interested in the promoted products or services, without burdening them with junk mail that ends up in the trash bin.