One way to promote your home based website is to run an off-line direct mail promotion. This article offers some tips about how to find the best possible mailing list for your direct mail promotion.
Many Internet marketers completely ignore the potential of off-line direct mail marketing strategies. You can easily design a promotional postcard that directs prospects to a page on your website. You can also run a mailing campaign from the comfort of your home via the services of an Internet-based company which will handle the printing and posting of your mail shot.
No matter how well designed and attractive your promotional postcard is,
if you do not have a good mailing list the results will be disappointing and you will have throwing good money down the drain. Just as you should strive to improve the impact of the promotional material that you send out, so you should seek out the best possible mailing list. Put simply, your aim should be to deliver the right message to the right audience.
So what is the best way of finding a good list? With thousands of lists available in many different categories, the best way of finding the most suitable one for you is to find a good list broker and explain exactly what you want to do. Make sure you distinguish between a list broker and a list manager, or list owner. A list manager is someone who has a list that he wants to sell to you. A list broker is someone who acts as an intermediary between the least buyer and the list manager. A good list broker will provide you with a choice of several different lists and a series of stats about the list and its performance ratings.
You can ask the broker to provide you with a "response list" or a "compiled list" in your chosen category. It is important to understand the difference between these two types of list.
A "compiled list" is a list of names that have been gleaned from public databases, such as club listings, customer listings, or listings of people who live in certain areas and so forth.
A "response list" is a list of people who have demonstrated by their purchasing history that they are interested in a certain type of product and are presumed to be likely to buy that kind of product again.
Response lists are more expensive than compiled lists because they are more responsive - as you would expect!
The age of the list is another important factor that you need to consider when choosing which list to go for. Generally speaking, the response rate of a list tends to decline as it gets older.
A list will also work better if it is tightly defined. You can help the broker find you the best lists by giving him a clear picture of the type of prospect you are aiming your mail shot at and what you want to achieve from your campaign. Do you want the responder to subscribe to a newsletter, download an ebook, purchase a product or join your downline?
Now that you have narrowed down your choice to just a few lists, you will want to test the list to see which one performs best for you. See if it is possible to buy a small number of names from the list, 500 or 1000 names will be enough. Test the list to see how well it responds by mailing the names and measuring the response rate. Do the same with several lists and see which list yields the best response.
You will need to calculate what is an acceptable response rate for your promotion and find a list that beats your minimum requirement. Once you have found such a list you will feel more confident in using it in conjunction with your mail shot.
Remember, direct mail marketing can be a very effective and profitable method of promoting your business, but you must be willing to test every aspect of the campaign from copywriting and design through to targeting your niche market and finding the best list for your promotion. Get all those aspects right and you will be sitting pretty.
