Contacting potential customers through the use of targeted marketing lists is becoming a more and more widespread mechanism for attracting new or repeat custom to a business.

Whether you are using the more conventional mailshot or telephone methods, or have decided on an email campaign, the use of well-targeted and accurate marketing lists may be crucial for the success of your promotion.

Finding the time and the resources in your business to develop and thereafter maintain your own lists may not be easy – which is where the direct marketing services providers may be of interest to you.

Once they have talked to you to determine your exact requirements, specialists like this can put together a list for you or update and cleanse you own list to help you to maximise the potential benefits for your campaign.

In addition to basic contact details like name and address, postcode, telephone and fax numbers plus email addresses, the information held on these lists can vary depending on the target audience.

If you are looking to contact consumers directly, details relating to employment and income, interests and leisure activities, loans and mortgages, insurances held and renewal dates can be very useful indeed to help you better target potential customers.

For businesses hoping to reach other businesses, well-constructed B2B marketing lists can contain a wealth of information about the company – size, turnover, number of employees etc. It is also very useful to have named contact points within the companies, so you can reach the right person and the one responsible for making the decisions. As an example, people may be more likely to open an envelope with their name on it than one addressed simply to ‘The Purchasing Manager’.

It is essential that such lists are regularly updated. Duplicate entries must be removed. People change job, get married, divorce and eventually, die. All of this key information, as well as mailing preference service requests, needs to be reflected in the lists.

In some cases it may even be against legislation to send out direct marketing to those who have opted for a preferential service, particularly using email, so having this type of information to hand may be very useful indeed.

It is in no-one’s best interest to send out information to people who are not there or who are just not interested. It wastes everyone’s time as well as your money and resources. So if you are hoping to run a successful campaign, you may find that using well maintained marketing lists can help you maximise the return on your investment.

Trevor J Roberts is the editor of TBO Services, who have over 16 years of Marketing, Data and Contact Strategy experience together we aim to provide a fresh approach to customer contact. We have a range of services including: Telemarketing, Data Services, Live Leads, and Email List brokers.

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I could tell you that the average temperature in the world is 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But that fact wouldn’t keep you from getting sunstroke in Cairo. Or frostbite in Tuktoyaktuk. Averages tell you only so much.

Direct mail response rates only tell you part of what you need to know. They tell you the percentage of people on your list who responded. That’s it. They don’t tell you if you broke even. If you made a profit. Or if the sales people who followed up on the leads closed any sales.

Response rates are misleading if you read them incorrectly. For example, I recently wrote a fundraising package for a North American nonprofit. The letter, mailed to a list of 6,850 donors, generated 35 gifts (responses). Run the numbers and that’s a response rate of half of one percent, a dismal result. But this number is misleading because my client (against my recommendation), mailed the letter to every donor in his database, including lapsed donors who had not made a donation for years.

So I asked my client how many active donors he had in his database. Two hundred, he replied. That’s 200 active donors out of a list of 6,850 total donors. Run the numbers again, and you’ll see that my letter generated a 17.5% response rate when mailed to active donors, or, to put it another way, when mailed to a good list.

Another problem with response rates, valid as they are, is that you cannot use them for every industry. Take the Olympic Games. When a nation applies to the International Olympic Committee, requesting that the Olympic Games be held in their capital city, they need a 100% response rate to succeed. They need one “client” to buy their proposal or their mailing has failed.

Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because he only mails it to 100 doctors, and he only closes around one in every 25 doctors who responds. A one percent response rate, even if it is an average, is of no use to him.

Average response rates are useful when they are for your product or service and your target audience in particular. If you can discover the response rates that your competitors are generating by mailing sales letters to the same prospects that you are targeting, then, by all means, use those response rates as a yardstick against which you compare your results. You are talking specifics.

Some response rates for various industries.

The Direct Marketing Association (www.the-dma.org) calculated the average response rates for a number of industries:

Fundraising: 5.35%

Retail: 3.36%

Businesses selling services to businesses 3.34%

Manufacturing: 3.17%

Personal and repair services 3.07%

Travel 2.98%

Computer/electronics: 2%

Packaged goods: 2%

About the author

Alan Sharpe is a business-to-business direct mail copywriter who helps business owners and marketing managers generate leads, close sales and retain customers using creative direct mail marketing. Learn more about his services and sign up for free weekly tips like this at http://www.sharpecopy.com [http://www.sharpecopy.com/newsletter].

© 2005 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online and in print provided the links remain live and the content remains unaltered (including the “About the author” message).

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It has been said that postcards are one of the most effective marketing materials out there. However, the importance of how you use the postcard headline in your design is understated and often overlooked. There are different ways to improve your postcard marketing strategies but a good place to start is in improving the way you construct your headlines.

Here are four things that you could look at in order to improve your postcard marketing headlines:

Can your headline grab your audience attention by itself?

The job of the headline is to grab the attention of your target audience. if your headline fails on this initial category, then you ought to think of a better headline that you should use. You should use a catchy headline that will stick to your audience’s head.

Your headline must be short and succinct. Ideally, your headline should contain nine words or less but there are exceptions. For example, you can use a headline that has ten words or more if your campaign is text heavy and you want to emphasize the text more than anything else. A strong headline stands apart from the image that you use. It is as effective, if not more effective as the image that you use in your postcards.

Offer a benefit or a promo that your audience can not refuse

One of the things that you can do in order to create an effective headline is to offer something of value right off the bat. You can create materials that have great design and concept yet get barely noticed by people. On the flip side, you can create prints that have a mediocre design and get away with it when you use prints that and headlines that offer different promos and benefits that give customers value for their money.

Another thing that you can do is to add a deadline to your offer so that you can create a sense of urgency on the part of the consumer. This sense of urgency will tilt the scales slightly in your favor.

You can also use white space to add to the appeal of your headline

The use of white space also can add to the appeal of your headline. The effective use of white space in your design will make the over all look of you prints to appear clean, neat and professional. Also, you can separate the headline from other elements of design using white space. Putting emphasis on the headline is also easier to do when you have plenty of white space on the design.

The body can help your headline

An effective and informative body is essential if you want to use headlines as teasers. The copy immediately following the teaser headline must be well written so that you will not lose the interest of your audience. a well written copy must contain all the necessary information about the product and service that you are offering. You must also include your contact information so that your customers can easily contact you for orders or queries about the product that you are selling.

More on postcard marketing tips and guides can be found at Most Affordable Postcard Marketing

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