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Copywriters who do direct mail

by Marc Rodill
3 replies
Hey, Marc here.

I'm ignorant about something. Therefore I have a quick question for a smart marketer who knows his stuff in regads to mailing lists. Specifically it's about doing list segmentation within a small business.

So. Here's the question, should you accept:

Let's say you're going into a business and you want to figure out who their best possible customer is, by certain information they have available: age, income, kids, car, etc. Whatever. You knwo the drill.

Is there a faster way than going through all of this information manually by hand? Or can databases generally search this type of information? Am I out of the loop here?

Please fill me in. Do I just get the list from the business owner and then hand it over to a list broker (or someone else) and have him run it against certain selects?

If you know the answer, maybe you can point me in the right direction. Or ask someone who knows for me. In return, I'll ask you to be my valentine.

You're excited. And you feel that.

Thanks,

Marc

PS. Just kidding. I'm off the market. But the question is a sincere matter with a serious desire to be answered in a sincere way. Thanks again.
#copywriters #direct #mail
  • Profile picture of the author Loren Woirhaye
    Call your local bulk mailer. They can merge and
    purge bulk mail lists to hit those sorts of households.

    Results are iffy though. You'll hit your target, but
    also a lot of folks out of it because the local
    bulk mailing lists are not very demographically
    reliable. They may be great for mailing pizza
    and oil change coupons to, but if you're marketing
    tutoring services you'll hit a lot of households
    outside that target because the list data
    misreports the presence of children in households.

    If you want to get a lot more specific, you have
    to pay more to rent lists from different sources
    and merge/purge those... so if you want upper
    income people with young children you can merge
    for periodicals (wall street journal, parenting)
    and then purge those not in the zip codes you
    want.

    A list broker can do this stuff.
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    • Profile picture of the author OutOfThisWord
      Yes, you can give current customer file to a company, like InfoUSA, and they will bounce against their database and give you back a lot of the info you are looking for.

      I would also suggest taking the top tier of customers, like the top 10-20% and do some manual look-ups too to gain some insight and to verify that the list service you hire to append demographic data to the customer list, actually did a fairly accurate job.

      Some companies will do it for free, hoping they will get your business and if you do pay, it won't be much.

      It is unlikely your business client will spring for a mailing to his entire universe of prospects, so that's why I always do a manual look-up of the top tier customers, then see how many are in the universe and it's usually more than they want to mail to, even for a test.

      Of course, after you test and pull a return, you can drill down to the next tiers of customers until you reach break even.

      Doesn't mean you'd never mail some customers, just not as often as you'd mail the ones with a higher Lifetime Profit Value.

      Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author Marc Rodill
    Thanks for the tips, Loren and Jim. Those are great ideas. Will be using. I owe you one.

    Marc
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