In my last post I talked about how to buy a mailing list. Now let’s discuss how to get new business with a mailing list.

A “one-off” promotion leaves money on the table. It used to take a minimum of 3 “touches” to get someone’s attention. The strategy used most was “call-mail-call” or “mail-call-mail.” (That sequence still works, BTW.)

Today, we’re all so A.D.D., that it probably takes at least 12 touches to get someone’s attention.The best return on a prospecting investment comes from a multi-touch or multi-step follow-up marketing plan. Some say it takes 52 to 360 touches–but nobody says “one touch is all you need.” So before you even buy a mailing list, know what you’re going to do with it. Here are some possibilities.

Telephone. Believe it or not, one human talking to another human still works! But you’ll need a savvy script that doesn’t come across as salesy. You actually need 2 scripts: one for connecting live and one for voice mail. Always end with a “soft” call to action rather than a hard sell, such as, “I have a special gift for you on my webpage at www.URLname.com/info.” Then be sure to have an opt-in box or other call to action on that webpage and set up Google Analytics to track it.

(BTW, there are no restrictions on calling business phone numbers, but you must follow national do-not-call rules when calling residential numbers. Go to https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov to get the latest regulations. (This being an election year, did you notice how the politicians managed to exempt themselves from this restriction, while us regular business taxpayers have to scratch off yet one more option for boosting sales?)

Direct mail. Whether it’s a letter, postcard, catalog or dimensional mailing (lumpy mail or boxes of tchochkes), decide if you want the mailing to “make the sale” or generate a lead. The latter is typically more effective…mail can’t represent you as well as you can, but it can pique interest in learning more about you.

There’s a correlation between the dollar amount of an average sale and how much you should invest in the cost of your mailing. I once had a business furniture dealer tell me, “direct mail doesn’t work.” Turned out he had mailed 1,000 furniture catalogs from his vendor to his Chamber of Commerce membership list. Cost per mailing was around $5/each. Total response: 0. He had no idea if these chamber members were in the market for furniture, yet he sent the Rolls Royce of direct mail packages…pricing included. Why would they need to call him?

Betting the farm on 1 promotion was a terrible idea. For the same money (probably even less), he could have sent a postcard (approx. 70¢ ea.), then followed up with 3 phone calls (approx. $1/ea.) and then sent a sales rep to personally deliver a catalog to anyone who showed interest. And still had enough money left for a pizza party for his staff.

Pictured is a great idea for a postcard–personalized graphic design. This card was sent to me by Bernie Bahn at Creative Imaging to showcase the company’s new variable data print service. (In case you can’t read it, the ticket in the hand has my name on it.) Definitely a stand-out, especially when used in a series of personalized touches.

Email. Prospecting email is also known as…spam. It’s not a marketing best practice, and it doesn’t even work anyway. Typically you can’t purchase an email list (at least, not from legitimate sources. You can rent an “email blast” that the list owner sends for you, but, again, I don’t recommend that be your very first touch.)

If you’re buying into the multi-touch idea, then when you make your phone call or follow-up phone call, ask for your prospect’s email address. I usually offer my tips newsletter, and about 30% give it to me. Then incorporate email into your follow-up series, later in the sequence.

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Fax. Yes, there are also regulations governing fax broadcasting. But it’s not impossible to use faxing appropriately in your prospecting sequence. (One best practice is to remove all lawyers from your list. Faxing is free lead generation for them–even when you’re in the right.)

The book I’m reading right now, “Five Minutes with VITO,” by Anthony Parinello and David Mattson, has the best multi-step prospecting sequence I’ve ever seen. Parinello, also the author of “Getting to VITO,” and Mattson, CEO of Sandler Sales Training, outline exactly the steps required to use letters, phone calls, emails, faxing and electronic presentations to successfully negotiate a meeting with your prospect company’s Very Important Top Officer.

Next post, I’ll talk about how you can automate the prospecting process while keeping it authentic.

Everyone in business wants to build a great mailing list. But when I speak and ask, “Who wants to get more email and direct mail?” nobody raises their hand. Interesting.

I’ve been a mailing list broker for over 25 years. The mailing list business has been up. The mailing list business has been down. Currently, I see a return in demand for snail mailing lists (or for us fossils, OLD media). I love email marketing. But prospecting emails won’t warm up a pipeline. So here are my top 6 considerations when buying a mailing list.

1. The more specific you are about your target audience, the more likely your prospecting efforts will be successful. When in doubt, think of 3 good customers (the ones who make you say, “Jeesh, wish I had 20 more just like her!”). What makes you say that? What characteristics, demographics, behaviors, interests make these people perfect to do business with? Tell us everything. We’ll help you figure out the best profile by asking you leading questions. We like to say, “There’s riches in niches!” So drill down–we can take it! (And…hint, hint: don’t tell us EVERYONE is a customer. We immediately know you have given zero thought to your business and we think, why should we?)

2. Please don’t need the list *5 minutes ago* Only cheap, generic and usually under-performing mailing lists are instantly downloadable. That’s not the kind of mailing lists we recommend or sell because we want repeat customers. (If that’s what you want, just browse online for “cheap mailing lists,” and take us out of the equation.)

True targeted mailing lists (a/k/a response lists) are actually somebody else’s customer list. The mailing list owner built a successful business, took care of his customers, and is now monetizing his mailing list asset by renting names–but only if you’re not a competitor. If you are a competitor, he’ll likely refuse to rent his customer list to you. The process of figuring out if you deserve access to these names (how would you feel if they were your names!) is called *submitting a sample mail piece* which takes time to process. You actually have to show the list owner what you plan to do with his names. They’re his names, so he can say, OK. Or he can say, “not happening.”

One last thing: There are over 60,000 mailing lists. Only 3 – 10 will be right for your business. It takes time and expertise to filter these options. Please, cut us some slack as we do the research for you.

OK, 2 last things: Don’t use us for market research. Or, if you want market research, tell us, and we’ll charge you for it. We sell lists; we’re not in the list count business.

3. Expect mailing list counts to be only estimates. You won’t know actual numbers until you place your order. List counts change because of updates and because the list count software can work off estimates, not live data. Speaking of updates, legitimate list owners update mailing addresses monthly or more frequently and update their data feeds quarterly or more often. If they don’t, we don’t recommend their mailing lists. 4. Prepayment is customary in the mailing list business. Or as we like to say, “When the USPS offers open accounts, we will too.” It’s nothing personal.

5. Expect delivery to take 5-7 working days. Yes, *someone* should be able to push a button and–ping–deliver your list to your inbox instantaneously. But, in reality, expect your list to take 5-7 working days to process.

6. What guarantees are available? Ah, if only life came with guarantees on everything! The bad news is, we have no idea if your prospecting program will make you money or not. We’re not in your business, and we don’t know if there’s a market there or not. You can use our online direct marketing calculator to see the response you need to break even. Does the answer scare you or make you say, “That’s do-able!”

The good news is we do have a guarantee on deliverability, something we can control. Most list companies will guarantee 80% or higher deliverability. We guarantee 98%. That means if you get more than 2% bad addresses or phone numbers, we’ll credit you. Can’t guarantee success, but can guarantee mailing list accuracy.

In the next post I’ll discuss what you can do with a mailing list.

There is one business secret that’s so easy to do, I’m amazed when I see resistance to it.

It’s list building.

I’d go so far as to say, if you don’t have a list, you don’t have a business. In fact, if you tell me the business you’re in and how many contacts you have in your database, I can tell whether you’re making money or not.

Here’s a general benchmark by industry category of how many names should be on your marketing database if you’re an SMB (small business). These are minimums based on my experience with client databases. Certainly, the more the better…if you actually do anything with your names!

3,000 Manufacturing/Industrial
5,000 Wholesale/Distribution
10,000 Retail
1,500 Professional Services

Following the “10X Rule” (10 times easier to sell a customer than find a new one), you should have 10 times more prospects on your list than customers. If you don’t, it’s time to buy a targeted mailing list and start prospecting.

One of the best ways to prospect is to call to get email addresses of your business contacts. In our office, we get an 80% permission rate. We’re not pitching; we’re offering valuable information. Then we put these people on a drip marketing series, based on their interest.

We’ve used this strategy for more than 4 years. Time consuming? You bet. But our opt-out rate is very low and we generate plenty of leads to keep all of us busy. Just this week, we got a “Let’s go; we’re ready” call from a prospect we first contacted over a year ago. There was never a doubt we’d be his vendor of choice–he’d received valuable info from us at least 24 times in our drip marketing campaign. (We could even tell which emails he read and which ones he ignored, so we were pretty prepared when he called!)

The size of your list matters. It’s one of the KPI’s of being in business. If your list is too small, your footprint in the marketplace is a tip-toe, not a stomp.

A good list can outperform a bad list by 10:1. But what makes a good list?

Unfortunately, you can’t buy the best mailing list in the world. You already own it. You may not yet have enough names to ring up the sales you need. But there’s no amount of money you can spend that will outperform this golden database. That’s because the best mailing list is your existing customer database.

These proven buyers don’t need a full-press sales pitch to buy again. They’re already pre-sold on your future offerings. All you must do is keep in touch with them and make suggestions on what they should buy next time.

However, many salespeople and business owners have to find new customers, so they need new prospect mailing lists. The best prospect mailing list is the one that has the closest demographics (or firmographics) to the company’s best customers.

The way to determine this is to do an “80/20 audit” of your customer database. If you manage your customer database in a contact manager, like ACT! Software, it’s easy to this audit quickly.

Many times I hear, “Everyone is my customer…anyone can buy from me.” While it may be true, no one has enough time or money to market themselves to *everyone.* An audit demonstrates that this is typically untrue anyway. You do dominate a niche…you just have to uncover which one.

Who is on the top 20% of your customer list responsible for 80% of your sales? If you don’t have a customer database, use your accounting software, and follow these 5 steps:

1. Run a report showing each customer’s year-to-date sales for the past 2 years
2. Export that info to an Excel spreadsheet
3. Sort the revenue column in descending order
4. Calculate 20% of your total revenue
5. Starting from the top of the list, go down until your reach that cumulative dollar amount. For example, if your total revenue is $2 million, go down the list of customers until you reach the list of customers who contributed $400,000.

Now really study who’s on this short list. (If a customer dropped into your lap from nowhere, and this occurrence will never happen again, scratch him off, and keep moving down the list. We’re looking for repeatable demographic profiles.) What do these customers have in common? What’s going on in their lives, companies or industries that made them buy from you?

Keep a notebook of your discoveries. It will come in handy when you do the next step in the research process. I’ll guide you through that next time.

Back in the 80′s and 90′s, keeping a customer database was “optional.” (Well, not to me. As a mailing list broker, I always thought it was mandatory.) Now? All three of the top marketing media–email, web, direct mail–are entirely list driven.

List building has become a coveted marketing discipline. The number of new names added to your list in the past week, month and year, is an important KPI. Whoever has the most names wins. With a passionate following of buyers and inquirers, you can reduce your marketing expenses with email and target niche and micro-niche markets with relevant offers to increase revenue.

What do Emily, Angie and GroceryLists.org have in common? Their growing lists helped them leverage infuence and build nationwide reputations. Leverage opens more doors than an individual has time to do on his own.

So how do you build a list?

First, you have to change your thinking. A list is not something you build “when you have time.” There’s never time. A list isn’t something you hand off to “I.T.” You don’t delegate relationships.

If you want the benefits of leverage, you must put skin in the game. From today on, marketing yourself at chamber meetings, networking events and leads groups must be filtered with this question, “How many net names will this activity add to my list?” You’re not “attending an event;” you’re “list building.”

Let’s start with an easy first step: The business card piles on your desk. Invest in a business card scanner. Once scanned, throw the cards away! (Yes, just do it.) The database you create can by synchronized to your PDA phone with a $49 piece of software. Now when you “think” about someone you need to talk or send an email to, you’ve got contact information at your fingertips…not back at the office. Leverage.

This may seem like a simple step, but…have you done it yet?

I’ve got dozens more list building strategies. If you’re interested, attend the City of Experts teleseminar where I’ll be the guest expert speaking on The Top 10 Ways To Build Your Marketing List. It’s coming up on July 9th.

You can also follow me on Twitter as I organize and post my thoughts for the interview.

Targeted Leads and Mailing Lists to Increase Sales

Click here for a mailing list counts and pricing Do you know what affects direct mail response the most? The mailing list. There are more than 75,000 mailing lists and email lists on the market. Aviva helps you find the ones that best fit your marketing plan. Then we add our expertise to evaluate each list’s previous performance, demographics (age, income, marital status, or type of business , etc.), psychographics (lifestyle patterns, purchase history, financial status, etc.) and geographic availability. Only then do we offer you an informed list recommendation.

Types of Lists Available

Student Lists

If you want to fill classrooms for summer sessions, you can get college students by year, major and gender at their home or school address. Or select high school seniors and juniors. We have lists of young adults without degrees, too. If you need students for continuing ed, we also have lists of business executives, up-and-coming management trainees (since they’re firing all the old-timers), career-changers and moms on re-entry. Ask about our NAASS discount if you’re a member.

Consumer Lists

There are over 90 million households in the US. Our consumer database contains double-verified information on each person in the household. Lists can be targeted by a combination of demographics, including age, income, presence of children, home vs. apartment, home value, length of residence, median education level, gender, marital status, and geography.

Resident/Occupant Lists

These lists are compilations of all addresses (without names) in a given geographic area. No personal demographics are available on resident lists. They are used in mass saturation mailings when coverage of a specific target area is more important than personalized selectivity . These lists are attractive because they cost less than “name lists” and can be presorted to the “carrier-route walk-sequence level” to qualify for the cheapest postage rate.

Business Lists

There are 12 million companies in our business database, which is compiled from reliable sources including yellow pages and business white pages, annual reports, government data, trade directories and much more. Each business is telemarketed at least once per year to verify the company’s demographics and ensure accuracy. Business demographics include:

• SIC Codes- Standard Industrial Classification, the government’s coding system which identifies types of business categories. The codes can be used to choose broad industry categories, such as manufacturing or retail or to select very specific industries, such as paper manufacturing or jewelry stores.
• Annual sales volume
• Employment size
• Top Decision Maker Name
• Phone Number
• Fax Number
• Number of Years in Business

Response Lists (Other People’s Customer Lists)

The above lists account for less than 1% of the 25,000 lists available. Everything else is considered a specialty or “response.” That’s because these are lists of people who have responded to previous offers by mail. Response lists are typically made up of people who like to buy by mail or who have inquired about products via mail, such as magazine subscribers, club members, mail order catalog buyers and lifestyle survey respondents. Although frequently more expensive, response lists are highly targeted and have proven their in creating mailing responses and orders.

Pricing

Each list is custom ordered to your specifications, but most lists have a minimum order price. Please use our inquiry form to get specific pricing for your project, but here is estimated minimum order pricing: Business and Consumer Lists – $295.00 Response Lists – $500.00+ (List pricing varies depending on requested specifications)

Our 95% Guarantee

Aviva strives for 100% accuracy at all times, however, no list is perfect. All of our lists are backed by a 95% deliverability guarantee to ensure accuracy. A written guarantee is provided with all mailing list orders. This is one of the highest guarantees in the list industry.

List Updating

Most mailing lists are updated on a bi-weekly basis. Additionally, lists are certified through the USPS’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database on a quarterly basis and duplicate names are removed. Additionally, the list is passed against the USPS’s national address file to add the zip+4 and carrier-route coding to each address. This verifies that the addresses are deliverable. It also increases your mailing’s chances for postal discounts. If information on an individual or company cannot be confirmed, the address is not added to the database until it can be verified by at least two sources. As a result, Action Lists has the cleanest mailing lists available for maximum deliverability and accuracy.

Build Your Own Database

Or Clean Up An Existing One! It’s five times easier to sell an existing customer than to find a new one! Aviva’s Data Entry and List Clean-Up Services will help you uncover your hidden sales potential by preparing your list for profitable customer mailings. These services include:

• Computerize your mailing list via quick data entry (from your business card collection, sales receipts or membership rosters)
• Code list sources and add unique identification number
• Standardize all addresses
• Add carrier route and zip+4 codes
• Eliminate duplicates
• Identify “bad addresses”
• Print out a zip code penetration report
• NCOA (Goes back three years to find customers who have moved before you send out your mail)
• ACS (Finds customers who may have moved when you send out your mailing)
• Mapping (Plots your database visually either geographically or by demographics)
• Overlay data (To improve your ability to target important customer clusters or add missing information, such as phone numbers or SIC codes)
• Reverse append mailing addresses to credit card receipts
• Save your database to a virtually indestructible CD-ROM

MAILING LIST COUNT REQUEST

Specialty List Sources:

Target business professionals in: Medical and Life Science; Association Members and Association Executives; Information Technology (IT) users; Small Office/Home Office (SOHO); Business Professionals and Mid-Level Professionals in the USA, Canada

Attention Sales Reps and Marketing Managers:

How To Build Free Mailing Lists With Thousands of Names and Put Your Sales And Marketing Into Overdrive In Under 2 Hours…Starting From Scratch

Contact Capture

Contact Capture makes putting contact information from lists, documents, and emails into a database as easy as “copy and paste.”

Contact Capture uses patent-pending technology to recognize contact information such as names, titles, addresses, emails, phones, websites. Then it exports the data directly into your favorite database application, like ACT! or Excel.

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Massive Action!

The Database Diva built a database of 7,000 contacts in just 3 hours using Contact Capture. (You don’t want to be one of her competitors!)

Fast

Contact Capture recognizes contact information faster than other solutions. Watch our video and see for yourself!

Simple

To capture contact information from a document, list or website, simply highlight the info and tap a key on the keyboard. Contact Capture springs to life and captures your contact instantly and then enters it into your database.

Value

Rather than purchasing separate programs to capture contacts from lists and documents, Contact Capture covers both bases with one easy to use product.

Get Contact Capture Free – $209 Value!

Simply register below and you will also get my free special report, “Make a Million with your Mailing List,” the definitive guide to marketing your business with database marketing and drip marketing campaigns.

Unlike competing software, when you download Contact Capture, you’re entitled to all future software upgrades. You can use Contact Capture with with ACT!, Outlook, Excel, and general text files.

So if you use Contact Capture with ACT! Database Software, for example, and you upgrade from ACT! 2008 Premium for Workgroups to ACT! 2009, you are entitled to a free upgrade as soon as Broadlook writes it. This is very unusual for a software developer, and a great value for you over time as you build your list.