Every marketing dollar counts in direct mail campaigns. You don’t want to be printing, folding, and mailing to inaccurate or nonexistent addresses or to people who haven’t lived at an address in years. Investing in your mailing list can pay off big. Here are five reasons to invest in a clean, up-to-date mailing list.
1. Customers expect you to get it right.
Nothing says, “We don’t care” like a misspelled name or street address. Sure, your mailer might get there (eventually), but at what cost? Keeping your list up to date ensures that your target audience knows that you care enough to get it right.
2. It helps with personalization.
Accurate, up-to-date lists are the starting point for creating relevant, personalized communications. Relevance starts with a correct geographic address. From there, you can build in other variables that improve your targeting efforts, but it all starts with the right city-state-ZIP.
3. It provides anchor points for identification.
As you build your database, current street addresses provide anchor points for accurately identifying each individual in your list. For example, is Jane C. Doe the same as Jane Doe? Are Bob Jones and Robert Jones, Jr. the same person? By cross-referencing by physical address, you can find out.
4. It improves targeting.
Once you have exact addresses for each of the people on your list, you can begin to build more detailed profiles of each one. Now you can start to match records from multiple sources to construct composite profiles that help further
personalize your communications.
5. It saves money.
When you are working with an accurate list, you save money not just by eliminating mail pieces, but by not duplicating pieces to the same individual or household. Clean, accurate lists save you money—sometimes, a lot of money.
Investing in your list to keep it clean not only helps you create an accurate, up-to-date profile of your customers that saves money, but also, because your email, social, and mobile marketing draw off the same list, it benefits your targeted marketing in other channels, too.
