Every direct mail campaign relies on targeted mailing lists. You need to know who you are mailing to personalize your mailings and utilize best practices. The first step starts with a little hard work, and that involves compiling the data you already have on hand. With this data, you can understand who your biggest purchasers are and determine similarities between each individual so that you can target other customers like them in the future more effectively.
Put Your Own Data in Targeted Mailing Lists
The first step should be determining who is your target customer. You can do this by reviewing past customers and start building targeted mailing lists from the ground up. When you do this, you should pay special attention to commonalities between customers so you can start constructing customer profiles. These profiles will give you a snapshot of your various customers and empower your marketing campaigns with all of the unique data that segments these individuals.
Now, every customer is unique. To say that a certain segment of your customer base is identical is a little misleading. You will most likely end up with a lot of different kinds of customer profiles, and there will be subtle differences that make each purchase just a little bit different. But this is where your hard work comes in since it’s your job to find where the data may overlap.
Though it may seem like a no-brainer, it is important just to focus on the customers that generated the most revenue for your business in some way—at least at first. Your other customers are important too, but initially, you should focus first on the profile that will help you target the most lucrative prospects.
What To Do With Your Profiles and Mail List
Although the goal is to ultimately understand your target audience, these profiles and mailing list can serve to inform many of your marketing decisions. You can break the mailing list down, if you haven’t already, by each individual’s purchase history so you can find trends in their buying habits to improve any marketing that targets past customers. You can also use these lists to help you form a reminder campaign, which is particularly relevant to any business that is appointment based.
Your Ideal Customer – Cloning Mailing Lists
Another common practice businesses use is after they have put in all of the hard work of building their mailing list to determine their ideal customer, they take this vital information and go purchase a clone mailing list. A clone mailing list is a collection of prospects that fit the customer profile you have developed. This is why it is important to focus on the customers who have purchased the most from your business since this new set of similar prospects will have a greater potential of bringing in large amounts of revenue.
How to Get Started
If you’re new to building targeted mail lists or haven’t had much success,we at One Stop Mail can help. We are direct marketing experts and will discuss your goals for your campaign and can offer consumer, B2B and customized lists. If you’d like help with the campaign itself, we develop the marketing materials and deploy the materials for you. Simply call 602.806.8775 or reach out to us, we’re here to help.
Updated 2.17.21