The direct mail mailing list is a key factor in a successful direct mail marketing campaign and a major point to consider in small business marketing strategies where marketing ROI (Return On Investment) is a key concern.

What really makes your direct mail marketing and advertising campaign successful?

The biggest single factor in success of your direct mail marketing strategy is who you send your mailings to.

A. You need a list.

This can be:

1) a list of existing customers or prospects who have inquired as a result of any of your marketing efforts or

2) a list which you purchase or in some cases obtain for free.

B. The mailing list must contain names of people who are likely to be interested in benefits of your products or services.

Don’t try and sell beer to Temperance Society or real estate to people who cannot afford it. You have to target your direct mail marketing efforts.

What kinds of lists are available?

C. The three basic kinds of lists that you can use are (you can use all three):

1. Your own list of prospects and customers. This is a list that you collected with your own personal marketing efforts. This is known as a house list. These people are most likely to respond to your offers, because they have responded in past.

2. A response list is a list of people that have actually done something. They have either purchased something from people who put together list or inquired in response to some offer or asked to be on list. They have some level of interest in topic or purpose of list.

You have a great company and you provide highest level of customer service. But as old cliché says: "A happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy customer tells 10 friends." You don’t have to worry about unhappy customer telling 10 friends because you always do a great job and keep your customers happy. But how do you increase number of friends that your happy customers are sending your way?

Plain and simple: You are going to have to reward them.

The reason that happy customers don’t tell many other people about your service is because most customers EXPECT good customer service so companies that provide it aren’t at front of their mind. They have too many other things to worry about on a daily basis.

By starting a Customer Referral Program you will give your best customers a reason to want to tell other people about you. Offering discounts or special incentives to customers who refer another person or company to your business is a win-win situation.

You may have medical licensing boards or other ethics committees for your profession that restrict you from certain types of rewards and rightly so due to conflicts of interest that may arise. But you can always find something that you can do to reward your customers when they refer someone to you.

Here is an example of a Customer Referral Program for a Direct Mail Company and how it works: