TheAddressers.com: Your Second Best Mailing List by:Kent Moon

The best mailing list a business has is the customer list

. An earlier article covers the benefits of mailing to this list.

So now you have mailed to your customer list and set up a regular schedule of mailings for the future. You have done sufficient research on the interests and needs of your customers to create compelling material that will be read and will generate response.

But a business does not live on existing customers alone and it certainly does not expand without bringing in new business. And no business that intends to survive the recession is thinking about "holding on" or "minimizing contraction" - the businesses that will come out of the recession stronger are the ones that find ways to expand.

This brings us to the subject of this article - your second best mailing list (after your customer list), and how to use it to accomplish direct mail marketing.

The mailing list to which direct mail is sent is the most important factor in the success of your campaign, head, shoulder and armpit above any other element. Award winning copy and killer graphics sent to the wrong list produce nothing, stories of selling refrigeration to Eskimos notwithstanding. So the second best list is important - it is the direct mail list that will generate response with in-house copy and inexpensive design.

The second best list is the list of people who have responded to past promotional efforts but did not buy. These are the folks that asked for the catalog or requested free information or subscribed to your newsletter or All that matters is that the individual responded to an earlier communication from your company.

These individuals have enough interest in what you do to have responded once. True they did not buy, but they reached. That is enough for the person to make it onto the second best list. The variations in degree of interest are infinite, as are the distractions that can re-direct that interest onto something else, like a malfunctioning copy machine or a child that needs to be picked up from school.

Having achieved the first reach, you can now develop, increase and focus that person's interest further. How? More communication. What do you say? Pretty much what you said the first time they reached, modified by anything you have learned about them or this group since.

If for instance you put out a newsletter to your clients and customers on a regular basis, you can add those who responded but did not buy to that mailing list. This is an inexpensive addition and one that will pay off as you rekindle the interest that resulted in the first reach.

The above also gives you a clue to the best mailing lists you can purchase - names of those who bought or responded to direct mail from competitors or other companies in your industry. This is not available in every industry, but it is in some. The Addressers can advise you on mailing list availability and potential. Just give us a call.

Wishing you the best of luck.

About the author

Kent Moon is President of The Addressers (http://www.theaddressers.com), a large direct mail, fulfillment, and database development and management company located in North Hollywood, CA. More of his articles on direct mail, fulfillment and database management can be seen at http://theaddressers.typepad.com/my_weblog/

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