Home | Subscribe | Contact Us | Advertise

Piece Together a Direct Mail Campaign

Step 1: Purchase a mailing list

Distributors are asked to do more for their direct mail clients than printing. They’re being asked to manage entire campaigns, from concept to delivery to post-delivery analysis. The course of a successful campaign starts with the mailing list. If end users don’t have one, then the consultative distributor will purchase one for them.

Unfortunately, the mailing list industry can be difficult for novice buyers to navigate. There are several major compilers of the raw data that feed into mailing lists. These companies, including Acxiom, Equifax, Experian, InfoUSA and Dunn & Bradstreet, sell directly to end users as well as list brokers. Buying a list from one of the largest companies is not always cost-effective. List brokers who purchase a large volume of information from the compilers often can offer competitive pricing.

More important than the price of the lists is their quality. Poor quality lists lead to above average rates of undeliverable mail, which ultimately costs the end user money. To gauge the quality of a list, ask the provider to guarantee a minimum delivery rate. “It’s the industry standard to say undeliverables on most lists are 10 to 15 percent,” says Tonya Brooks, president of Mailers Haven, a Valencia, Calif.-based list provider that deals only with the reseller channel, including printers and distributors. She says that good list companies will back up their claims with a money-back guarantee. “If they say they’ll give you more records, that’s a lame guarantee,” she says. “That’s a very inexpensive way for them to make the problem go away.”

Another way to gauge the quality of the data is to ask how often the provider’s lists are updated. “There are a couple companies that will sell data very inexpensively, but it hasn’t been updated recently,” says Brooks. Furthermore, not all lists are appropriate for a direct mailing. “When you buy lists that are inexpensive, they may have been intended as telemarketing lists, where you don’t have a high acquisition cost. It’s a lot cheaper to call a bad list than to send direct mail to it,” says Brooks.

Creating the list itself involves making decisions. Distributors need to have a clear idea of who their client is trying to reach with the direct mail campaign. Compilers often charge a base price and charge more for each selected category used to further segment the list, including age, gender, income and home value. Some providers such as Mailers Haven include category selection as part of the base list price. “People need to target their lists. We want them to hone their list as well as they can and not stop from choosing an additional category like age because it would cost them an extra $5,” says Brooks. “Buying a substandard mailing list will cost your clients much more in wasted postage and printed material than the penny saved buying a poor list.”

Buying a bad list could cost more than the client’s money. It could cost you the client. Brooks remembers the mail house that prompted her and her business partner to start Mailers Haven: “They were so scared about buying a list, because they knew if they bought a bad list, they would lose the mailing, and the mailing was where they made their money,” she says.

—Andy Brown