Your success depends on your mailing lists. According to late great Ed Mayer, the success of every direct marketing campaign depends on 40 percent mailing lists, 40 percent offer, and 20 percent everything else. In other words, pick bad mailing lists and you will certainly fail. Pick good ones and you are on the road to success.

Did you know there are more than 50,000 mailing lists available to you? I’ve come to believe there is a list for every purpose. If you are a catalog merchant trying to reach your niche buyers, there are good lists for you. If you are a non-profit trying to reach sympathetic donors, there are good lists for you. If you are a publisher trying to reach interested readers, there are good lists for you.

So how can you find good lists for your business? Here are four simple rules to follow on your quest for better mailing lists. Read the rest of this entry »

Technological capabilities have advanced almost to where if you can think of it, it can be done. This mentality has led to cutting-edge prospecting tools for many publishing mailers working with brokers who have stayed ahead of the curve.

Publishing mailers have used prospecting models successfully for some years. For example, they would send a group of their core direct mail responders to a company such as Donnelley, Equifax or Experian. Those names would be matched against the modeler’s database to determine strong and weak traits of those individuals, such as age, income and gender. The database then would be narrowed and scored/ranked from most likely to least likely to subscribe.

A publisher could mail to these individuals, sometimes mailing deep within a model. This has been a great tool for acquiring subscribers. But with the knowledge obtained from the acquisition model as described above, a mailer also could optimize both its outside lists and its own expires.

For instance, if you learned that typical responders to your direct mail campaigns are women older than 40 with household income surpassing $50,000, you could overlay your outside lists and expires to find similar individuals — those most likely to respond to your offer. The key ingredients to making this work are: Read the rest of this entry »

With times as tough as they are it is imperative that mailers are armed with the information and resources required for investing wisely in direct mail efforts.

As a publishing broker in the direct marketing industry, it is important for me to help my clients maximize their efforts while spending the least amount of money possible.

One way I can do this is to know what works for them and stick with that formula.

In our industry, we can measure success by response to an offer. However, even though we have numbers to work with, we need to know what to do with them and how to analyze them. Read the rest of this entry »

Direct-marketing campaigns are most successful when the creative, the offer and the lists all work together. List brokers help execute hundreds of campaigns for multiple clients, then tabulate the results. So after a while, on top of our vast experience qualifying and selecting the best lists for client campaigns, we also develop a sixth sense about what creative works and how an offer is best presented.

These 10 Tips are intended to help you increase your campaigns’ effectiveness. The more you partner with your list broker and take advantage of our experience and insight, the more you’ll avoid common missteps and get the best response rates. Read the rest of this entry »

David James of Bethesda List Center shares his secrets on direct mail marketing success. Read the rest of this entry »

Considering both the media scrutiny-as well as the political outcry-over data-collection processes employed by a number of high-profile U.S. companies, one might assume that when it comes to customer knowledge, American business knows it all. The sheer volume of data collected is massive; the number and variety of sources from which consumer information is gleaned-from credit applications and transactional histories to self-reported surveys and website registrations-appears to be endless. And did we mention the astonishing abundance of readily available public information?

So why, in this era of high-definition digital possibilities are a surprising number of otherwise sophisticated marketers still viewing their customer information in black & white? Read the rest of this entry »