News
 7
Basic Tips for Finding Successful Lists
The purpose of your mailing is to find prospects,
not to create them. Old-time direct marketers would
say you are asking prospects to “raise their hands”
to indicate that they are interested. Fred Morath
recommends seven basic tips that you should consider
even before you decide to acquire lists for any
promotion.
1. Select the best type of offer to meet your sales
objective. If you want to do lead generation, you
should plan a "soft offer" that makes it easy as
possible for a prospect to sign up online or by
mail. Offer your prospects free information, a free
newsletter subscription, a white paper, or a
discount coupon, so that you can generate the
largest possible response. You must get the complete
name and address with the first mailing.
To find a more qualified buyer, you should make a
"hard offer," such as a discount you receive only
when you visit a store in person, a premium you
receive for taking a test drive, or a paid
membership to get discounts on books. The mailing
generates fewer names, but the hard offer generates
highly qualified lookers or actual customers.
For Web site traffic, you're aiming at getting
visitors to click on your site. Go beyond a casual
click if you can. More sites are getting the
prospect's complete name and address by having a
free login on the home page to enter the site, with
no obligation, or offering an e-mail newsletter. For
a hot Web site, you might request a full
registration.
2. Your first mailing should search for prospects,
not sales. For effective lead generation, choose
lists that contain all your available prospects that
are not narrowed down so far that you eliminate live
prospects. Rent the largest list you can afford,
knowing that only 1.5 percent to 10 percent will
respond. Look at each list as a big pond that you
are going to troll to identify the special people
who will respond to your offer.
3. A mailing list is not a list of "leads." Many
hours are wasted every day in list searches that
attempt to narrow down a list to only the people who
are truly "leads," the small number of people who
are really sufficiently "hot" or "warm" to be given
to a salesperson, or entered into your customer
database. In demographic lists, some mailers tightly
limit income selections to "high rollers." In B-to-B
marketing, a mailer will whittle down a list to top
executives, when they really should go after a
larger universe.
A compiled directory list of 100 "family
restaurants" might be regarded as true "leads" for a
local salesperson, but a direct marketer would mail
to the entire universe first, to select very few who
would "raise their hands" as live prospects.
4. Some of the best lists are magazine subscription
lists. Subscribers to any special interest
publication have already identified themselves as
your prospects. They will be more responsive than
almost any other list category.
There are hundreds of excellent lists from
controlled circulation business magazines for which
no-charge subscriptions are given. In exchange,
subscribes must provide detailed information about
their job function or title, number of employees and
annual sales. Last, and most important, they must
provide who has the authority to purchase specific
products, many of which are branded products that
you may be selling.
Other magazines, especially consumer subscription
lists from publications for which the subscribers
pay for the subscription, seldom have "selects.” To
evaluate a magazine list, look at a copy of the
magazine to learn what kind of people are reading
the magazine. In searching for lists of art
collectors for a Massachusetts gallery, we found the
best magazine had 87 full pages of ads for art
galleries; obviously the readers were all potential
art buyers.
When your target is every business in a specific
industry, there is no better source than compiled
business lists that permits selections of every
industry by fine-tuned S.I.C. codes, executives by
name, and telephone numbers.
5. Order enhanced lists to improve your targeting.
Paid magazines like Fortune don't collect customer
data lists, so they enhance them with consumer
data---age, income, and lifestyle selects, but no
business data. More lists than ever are being
"enhanced" by being matched against these nationwide
household databases. Consumer magazines like the New
Yorker or Smithsonian do not gather data on their
customers, so they are now matching their subscriber
lists against giant databases that are full of
personal information."
6. Look closely at the sources of your lists. Ask
where the list came from, who put it together, what
are the sources of the names? Some lists are based
on inquiries, some on actual purchases or
transactions. Some lists are built from successful
marketing companies where every name is treated as
special and valuable; others are quickly harvested
from sweepstakes mailings or from Internet clicks.
Use lists of names generated by direct mail instead
of compiled lists wherever possible; compiled lists
cost less but are less targeted and less frequently
updated. Use compiled, membership, or directory
lists whenever they are appropriate -- for example,
the American Medical Association list may offer more
doctors with specialties than any other source.
7. Review list datacards to validate every list. Be
sure to check these data elements near the top of
every datacard:
• Date of last update. If the list has not been
updated in the last 12 months, be wary.
• Unit of sale is the average purchase of people on
the list, or the subscription price of a paid
magazine, or the average donation to a nonprofit.
Give priority to buyers if you sell products, but
don't pass up good lists just because they don't
have a buyer history.
• Look at the source of the list "media." Are they
100 percent direct mail or 100 percent compiled?
Internet generated, self-reported, or culled from
responses to space ads? Direct mail respondents will
get better results if you're selling by mail, but
won't apply to other types of purchasing.
These seven topics touch most of the key elements in
list selection. Remember, as a buyer of lists, you
can ask the questions and get good answers. The list
owners who create the lists, the list managers who
re-sell them through brokers, and the brokers who
buy and sell complex lists every day, are some of
the smartest people in our direct marketing
industry. Let them help you!
---Sources:
Reprinted from DIRECTTips November 7, 2007 (directmag@pbinews.com).
Fred Morath is a direct mail consultant, copywriter
and list specialist at Fred Morath Direct Marketing.
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