Direct Mail Made Easy

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Targeting Your Prospects

One of the beautiful things about direct mail advertising is its ability to enable you to specifically target your best prospects. Through the skillful use of mailing lists you can direct your message to those most likely to be interested in your product or service.

What a great benefit.

Think about this. Suppose you are a realtor seeking listings. Chances are you operate within a limited market. It could be a single town, a county, or in a major city, maybe just a few neighborhoods. If you advertised your services in the newspaper or on the radio, for example, you would reach an audience much larger than the one you are interested in. You would have plenty of waste and would be spending money needlessly trying to reach people who have no interest in or need for your services.

Direct mail, on the other hand, enables you to select a list of people located specifically within your market area.

Residential markets can be targeted quite specifically. You might select an entire town, if you live in a suburban area. Or you could select specific zip codes. You can even select by specific streets or other boundaries that you determine. And that’s not all.


Once you know the general area you want to reach, you can further select by individual household characteristics such as the following:

Single or multiple family dwelling units
Length of time the family has resided there
Neighborhoods having homes of a particular value
Families by age of the head of the household

With this information you can tailor your message to the specific interests of the audience you are reaching. This eliminates waste and makes it much more likely that you will gain a higher level of response and at a lower cost.

When I lecture to audiences about direct mail, I often ask the question, “what is junk mail?” The answer I usually get is that it is “mail that doesn’t interest me”. So, when we take the time to carefully select our target audience we are much more likely to avoid our mail getting tossed in the “junk” pile…and instead we stand a good chance of having it opened and read.

Many advertising experts attribute as much as 60% of the success or failure of a mailing to the choice of mailing list. You may have the world’s most attractive mailing package, a sensational offer, your copy written by the best copywriter around….but if you send that mailing package to the wrong audience chances are high that you will not achieve the results you’re looking for.

On the other hand, a very ordinary looking mailing package, an average offer and a writer with no special talent can produce a mailing that, when sent to the right audience, can still produce a very satisfactory level of response.

None of us would think of advertising our local business in a newspaper that serves a market 200 miles from where we are….yet, if we select a mailing list of people who are not appropriate for our offer we’re doing about the same thing.

So, before you put pencil to paper on your next mailing ask yourself one simple question…

“Who am I trying to reach with this mailing”?

When you answer that question, get with a list professional and select your list FIRST. .

It will pay off…big time.

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