Specialized Mailing Lists Make All the DifferenceWritten by Joy Gendusa
If there is one thing I can’t say enough it is that most important part of your mailing campaign is your mailing list. It is vital that you put right amount of energy into learning about lists – who to mail to – so that your mailing efforts aren’t wasted. There are a few different ways that you can get an adequately targeted list.As always first step is to determine who your target market will be. Should you market to consumers or businesses? For this example consider that your product is a set of home woodworking tools. This should be marketed to consumers because it is not an industrial grade product. Good, now we have narrowed it down to only 291,324,219 people in US. As a minimum, your mailing campaign should send to same names three times. So all you have to do is send out 873,972,657 postcards at $0.185 per piece & you get point. We need to narrow it down some more. So how do you accomplish narrowing of your list? Many factors can be considered, including age, gender, zip code, annual salary, profession and number of children are some of more common qualifiers. It may take a while to figure out what combination works for your specific product. Don’t worry about political correctness when considering whom you should mail to. It is perfectly acceptable to test certain lists that may be considered "stereotypical". Many times these lists will work well. But you never know until you test them. A special eye cream would go to women over 40, right? You need not worry that you’re targeting “older women” or that 40 is no longer considered old. No matter how great an idea you have about a certain market, ALWAYS DO A SMALLER TEST MAILING FIRST! Average test mailings run around 1000-1500 names. Once you see acceptable returns on smaller mailing then you can jump in with larger numbers. You may think 40+ is a good age to start with eye cream, but you may get better results purchasing age 50+. Test test test!
| | Raise Your Income!Written by Joy Gendusa
How often do you sit around and wonder how to make more money and get more people to buy more from your company? It’s one of most basic problems every company faces.The answer is astonishingly simple. Too simple maybe. But I’ve seen it work over and over again with our customers in every line of business you can imagine. You have to promote. Your income is governed by size of your customer base and how often and effectively you communicate with those customers. So raising your income is simply a matter of keeping in touch with your existing customer base, reminding them you are there, offering them goods or services they might be interested in, in such a way that they want to buy more and more often from you. And increasing size of your customer base by finding and contacting potential customers and persuading them to buy your products or services and then adding them to your customer base and keeping in touch with them in same way. If you have a good service or product and you make sure you service your customers well, you cannot fail to raise your income. How rapidly you raise your income depends on how rapidly you do these actions, how much you promote. Handling quantity or volume of promotion is definitely most obvious thing you can do on an immediate basis. Believe it or not, if you send out crappy, crappy promotion, your income will go up. You may not be happy with Return on your Investment (ROI) for that marketing effort, but definitely it will raise your income. Once quantity is handled and you are sending out loads of promotion, you want to tweak it and raise quality of your promotion. And here are some things you can do.
|
