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Contact data is extremely important for so many reasons, from billing to house calls to marketing – you need to be able to reach both prospects and customers. Lists are compiled many ways:
- Saved information when you were hired to perform work
- Email sign-up form field entries
- Purchased names, emails, and phone numbers from a list broker
When I’m consulting with business owners, I get asked all sorts of questions about list purchase. Well thought out list purchases are a great way to drill down on some core information about people. You can essentially target household incomes, how many generations live in the home, educational background, and even health-related information.
Depending on the level of specialization, the costs can actually be quite reasonable if you’re willing to do some of the mailing grunt work yourself.
You can keep it real simple when you use bulk coupon mailers that target zip codes, but the more a list can be defined, the better the results. Whenever you purchase a list, you need to think about the costs associated with running your campaign more than once, and preferably getting on a regularly scheduled routine.
This is where great targeting comes into play.
A great list has been refined. What do I mean by that? [Read more…] about How Do You Know if You Have a Useable ‘List’?
If you’ve been in business a number of years, it’s time to think about who you have considered to be your target market. This is actually not an easy question. If your business is in a service industry, construction company, or even if you’re a CPA, you may have considered your customers to be anyone who needed those services. That’s not the data I want you to consider. 
Narrowing the focus of your newsletter to particular segments will increase your bottom line – whether you’ve got a huge list or not. Use newsletter design elements to keep your regular offers in front of your reader and introduce new ones, but cover specific material in the body content.