Your Mailing List Options

Which mailing list is right for my needs?
Imagine you are in a room of 100 strangers plucked at random from the entire U.S. population, and you are trying to start up a conversation about, say, baseball. How many of these folks, plucked from all walks of life, do you think would want or be able to engage in this conversation with you?

Now imagine another room of 100 strangers, placed together randomly except for their being sports fans. How many people in this room do you think you'd be able to engage in conversation about baseball? Maybe 30 people in the room only like basketball or hockey, and another 40 people have only a passing interest in baseball. This still leaves 30 people who like to talk about baseball, and might be happy to speak with you about it, for no other reason than their interest in the topic.

When you are applying your energy and resources in taking your message from person to person, you want to be communicating with the audience most receptive to what you have to say. There's a world of people out there for whom your product or service represents a solution to a problem, a delightful luxury, or a very useful tool. If you can stack the room with 100 of these people, you'll be overwhelmed with new clients.

Direct mail marketing cannot deliver you only the addresses of those people ready and eager to buy your special Widget X, but, like the room of sports fans, it can give the addresses of people who have bought other types of Widgets, the addresses of people with the means to buy Widget X, the people whose lifestyle would be made much easier by Widget X. Probably a good number of these people would be interested in Widget X.

There are three basic types of mailing lists, each of which delivers a different type of ear to your message:

Business mailing lists
If your product or service is business-to-business, this is the kind of mailing list you want. You can choose the region or regions you'd like the businesses to be located in, and which industries you'd like your list to focus on. Industries are selected by Standard Industrial Classification (SIC code), a system by which all businesses are minutely categorized ("buckwheat farm," "book printing," etc.). If you've developed a new blackboard that teachers cannot live without, for example, you can get a list of every grade school, community college, or high school in your greater metropolitan area.

If you want to send your postcards out to, for example, real estate and insurance offices, you'll find a huge number of potential addresses on your list. It may be worth your while to whittle down your list to those offices most sympathetic to your message. This might be done by restricting your list based on the number of employees, sales volume, or the year the business was started. Does your service or product appeal particularly to small businesses, businesses just getting on their feet, or enormous offices?

This mailing list includes company name and address; for an additional charge we can include a name of a particular person at the company (president, head of marketing, etc.), and telephone and fax numbers for follow-up calls.

Consumer mailing lists
If you are selling to the general public, this is the mailing list you want. You zero in on the contact information of your most likely new clients first by choosing a region or regions of focus. From here there are three broad categories that delimit the people you might mail your postcard to: demographic, economic, and lifestyle information. You will want to reflect on who your clientele is before you compose this list.

Demographic information by which you can delimit your list includes gender, age, number of children, education level, age, occupation, and more. If your product especially appeals to divorced, college-educated women, in late-middle age, you can find them.

Economic information by which you can delimit your list includes income level, length and type of residence, whether they're credit card users, and more. If you want the addresses of all the millionaires in town, or all the apartment renters, you can find them.

Lifestyle information by which you can delimit your list includes interest in the arts, bicycling, civic activity, foreign travel, pets, car ownership, wildlife, and dozens more. This is a very powerful factor in creating a mailing list of precisely those people more interested in your message.

Neighborhood mailing lists
A neighborhood list is not as precisely targeted as a business or consumer list; it is a mailing list of every address on a postal carrier's route. While this mailing list may include many addresses of people not at all interested in your product or services, and is certainly not for every mailing, there are distinct purposes and advantages to mailing to every mailbox in the neighborhood.

If you're a local business looking to drive up walk-in traffic, or get the word out about a promotion, or simply connect with the people who drive past your business every day, neighborhood lists let you inside every home around.

What makes neighborhood lists an option worth special consideration is that by delivering your postcard to every address on the postal carrier's route, it is applicable for a very considerable postal discount which for large-scale mailings can save you many hundreds of dollars.