What Makes a Great Prospect Data List?
Finding or obtaining the right data to use for your marketing efforts requires time, money and testing. For direct mail, your prospect data list is critical to its performance.
While each company or organization may need to look at different data points, we put together this quick summary on what we advise our clients to consider while constructing their prospect data lists to use for their direct mail campaigns.
Contacts Are Qualified to Buy
- They live near your store (specifically important for Retailers)
- Contacts meet your basic customer requirements based on what you offer (homeowner, owns a vehicle, pet owner, gender, etc.)
- These contacts can afford your product or service (review income parameters)
- Any indicators that may flag them as a potential high-value buyer (If they own more than one pet, house or vehicle, etc. and have a history of purchasing frequently or they purchase higher ticket items for their pets, houses or vehicles)
Contacts Have Responded to Other Direct Mail Offers
- Compiled lists often include mail responsiveness indicators (gathered from a variety of a list provider’s internal sources and can indicate who responded to direct mail offers from other companies)
- Use your subscriber or donor lists (as a standalone list or match to other internal purchase lists to see who responded to your direct mail in the past)
- Co-op lists can be another option to explore
Follow the Quality Over Quantity Rule
- It’s always better to target quality contacts because they are more likely to respond to your offer, from being pre-qualified, therefore increasing your campaign’s ROI
- By adding non-qualified contacts in just because you have them will hurt your overall campaign performance and its results
- If you focus on quantity over quality, you cannot truly determine if your campaign worked effectively or not
Additionally, it’s important to note that not everyone responds to every marketing channel. Some people respond to television commercials while others prefer direct mail. As a result, this why a multi-channel marketing strategy is becoming a necessity.
The Big Question to Ask
If you could wave a magic wand, you probably want more customers that look just like your best customers from a frequency and margin standpoint. Do you know what your best customers look like from a demographic, psychographic, geographic standpoint? If not, PrintComm can help you with this.
Want Some More Help with Your Prospect Data List?
Would you like help developing a great prospect list or do you want to learn how to enhance your current data list to improve your direct mail response rates? Feel free to reach out to us or give us a call at 810-239-5763!
