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Targeted Mailing Lists Help Expand Business

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Posted by Century List Services on March 8, 2010 – 5:15 pm
Filed under Targeted mailing lists

Targeted Mailing Lists Help Expand Business

One of the best ways to expand your business is to reach out to your customer and let them know about relevant products and services you can offer them. The key word in the previous sentence was “relevant”. Many mailing lists exist out there that can help your business succeed in its direct marketing efforts. You can find many lists of contact information available for sale that can be used for campaigns. But if you are targeting a list that is just a dump of names then you can do more harm than good. Today people are so frequently bombarded with marketing messages that they will get sick of ads they receive in their inbox or mailbox that doesn’t target them. Not only are you wasting your money by sending material to people who aren’t interested but also you are also harming your reputation. This is a sure way to turn off customers and ensure they won’t do business with you in the future. What you need is targeted mailing lists that contain a very specific set of contact information for people who are genuinely interested in your offerings. You should work with a reputable list broker who can help ensure you are getting legitimate lists that express customer’s true intentions so as to make your campaigns effective.

Direct Marketing Offers That Work and Don’t Work

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Posted by Century List Services on November 15, 2009 – 3:04 pm
Filed under Direct Mail

The following are tips for direct mailing offers that work:

White Paper / Position Paper
A white paper refers to information provided by an expert. The term “white paper” comes from the fact that they are prepared very simple and straight forward– black ink on (usually) white paper, research paper style. The goal of the white paper is to provide meaningful information, research findings, trends, predictions, and positions. White papers give the impression that you are an industry leader or expert.

Special Report
A special report is an article full of information that is of interest to your prospect; especially created to address your prospect’s interests and challenges.

Tool Kit
Tool kits (such as a How-To checklist, an audio CD, a workbook, articles, a directory, etc.) offer information-based tools that make work easier and suggest that something will get done.

Workbook / Tutorial
A workbook or tutorial offers step by step instructions, suggestions, or explanations of a process in their work. As workbooks and tutorials have a high perceived value, they are also used as reference material.

Survey / Survey Results
Prospects like to know that your opinions or positions are based on facts or research. A survey is good, current, research, usually unique to the target market. It is information that could aid in the decision making process for a prospect. Surveys also have a highly perceived value and work well as an offer.

Sweepstakes
A creative and imaginative sweepstakes can be a valuable offer. They key is to make the prize something that interests your prospect and makes them want to enter. Think deeply on this one. You might be surprised at what your prospect would be interested in winning.

Offers you can use:
• Free CD audio
• Free webinar
• Paid webinar
• Meet-and-greet session
• Free report
• Checklist/guide
• Bundled products for discount
• Tickets
• Anniversary gift
• Handbook
• Free kit
• Free consultation
• Free product
• Care package
• Savings certificate
• Save ___ percent and receive four free gifts
• I’ll pay half of your _______ bill, to gain you as a new customer
• Newsletter
• First month free
• Audit/critique

The following are direct mailing offers that don’t work:
• Offers with a long deadline
• Free information with no details
• An offer that has no benefit to your prospect; too much you and not enough them.
• Something that is hard to get or hard to figure out how to get.

Direct Mailing Lists for Your Campaign

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Posted by Century List Services on June 22, 2009 – 3:08 pm
Filed under Direct Mail

The following are the different types of mailing lists that you can use for your direct marketing campaigns:

House List
The House List is an internal list compiled from information you already have. The list includes people you already know or have had contact with. Typically, this is a list of customers, a list of people who have inquired about your services, or have sent a response to you.

With your best prospect being current customers, your house list represents your best prospect list for selling more products or services to. It will outperform a high-quality purchased or rented mailing list because the people on list already know you, trust you, and have confidence in their business with you.

A house list is built over time and will prove immensely valuable.

Compiled List
The Compiled List is a list of composed, collected, and edited information. The data had been collected or accumulated from several sources and entered into a database program. Sources for this information could be public records (ex: water and public utility bills, voter and vehicle registration lists), public and professional directories (ex: chamber of commerce, trade associations), and even the White and Yellow pages.

The benefit of compiled lists is that they are sourced from high volume directories, which contain important demographic information with database segmentation in them. The challenge, however, is that they lack the quality of being proven direct responders.

Response List
The Response List is a list of people who have responded to an offer. It could be a TV or print ad, infomercial customers, direct mail response, catalog purchaser, magazine subscriber, or free report responders.

Publication List
The Publication List is a list consisting of a publication’s paying subscribers. These lists are good because, like the magazines, they are usually very targeted to their audience. Any publisher, no matter how large or small, is a good source for list rental.

Hotline List
Hotline is a term in the direct marketing business that is used to describe “the hottest, freshest, most recent” members of a list. This list contains information of people who have responded, purchased within the past 90 days. Although some list owners promote their lists as “hotter”, with a monthly or weekly update, the industry standard for a list being “hot” is 90 days.

Membership List
A Membership list is basically a membership roster of organizations, clubs, and associations. These lists are not always available and sometimes difficult to acquire, but you can contact various organizations directly to try to arrange a list rental or purchase.

E-mail List
E-mail lists can be obtained from many of the aforementioned list sources, provided e-mail information was also collected when gathering their data. You can also acquire e-mail addresses yourself by creating content on your website, such as a survey, contest, or free offer, where you can ask for an e-mail address.

Business and Consumer Lists
Business lists reach individuals at a particular business. Consumer lists target people at home. Although the information on these lists can sometimes crossover due to things like people who work from home, the general rule of thumb is to target the place where the service or product will be used.

List Brokers

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Posted by Century List Services on April 21, 2009 – 5:36 pm
Filed under List brokers

List Brokers

When you are promoting your business the content is king in terms of how you put the campaign together and the value proposition you are pitching to your customers. You will need to think long and hard about any campaign materials you are sending out to ensure that the customers you are targeting will fully understand the value that you have to offer. Once you have done this though and equally important consideration is in determining who will receive the campaign. A poorly directed campaign will alienate customers and can do a great deal of harm to your business in that you will get a junk mailer status in the mind of many consumers. In addition laws exist against sending junk mail and email and so you could also face hefty fines. This means if you want an excellent return on investment on your campaigns you need very good mailing lists that specifically target customers who will be interested in your products. These lists need to have been well conceived and developed so that you maximize the investment in your advertising campaigns by only reaching out to potential customers. List brokers can help you source high quality lists to ensure your campaigns are successful.

Business Telemarketing List

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Posted by Century List Services on April 16, 2009 – 9:35 am
Filed under Telemarketing Lists

Business Telemarketing List

Telemarketing has an incredibly bad reputation due to the many unscrupulous companies that conduct this practice. The big problem with telemarketing is that many telemarketers are very indiscriminate in who they contact and they will essentially phone any number they can get their hands on. They will be very pushy and they will promote products that are totally irrelevant and out of context given that they are simply calling what are little more than random numbers. This is unfortunate as it tends to cloud the value your business can get from telemarketing. You shouldn’t let these unscrupulous telemarketers turn you off from pursuing a campaign directed at a well developed and well targeted list. If you want to conduct B2B transactions over the phone you can do so very reasonably given the customer nature of B2B services. You can contact customers that you know have a high probability of being interested in your services and thus you are actually adding value to them as opposed to just being an interruption. The key to doing this effectively is to have a highly targeted business telemarketing list so that you know the numbers you are calling belong to companies that will legitimately be interested in your offerings.