A complaint filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethnics in Washington (CREW) says that Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential candidate, has unlawfully sold his mailing list for $42,000.  Whether Newt was unlawful or not, is it possible for a mailing list of this kind to be worth the amount paid?

Before we jump to conclusions, let’s look at how mailing lists are valued.  Certainly, if the list will be used for direct mail purposes, and said direct mail campaign performs as expected, the answer is yes.  But, has the list been proven to respond?  How many records are on his mailing list?  Is it for one-time use or can the mailer use it more than once?  How clean is the list?  Here’s how BB Direct would value the mailing list before adding it to our mailer’s ...

There are essentially two ways to use email marketing; broadcasting your email message to a known audience of existing customers, members, warm prospects, and broadcasting your email message to an audience which has no prior affiliation with you and your business.

Existing Customers

The first type of email is when you want to reach your existing customers. This group of people have done business with your company or organization, they recognize your brand, they likely use your product or service. Like postal direct mail marketing, this type of email broadcast is typically far more successful in terms of response.

New Prospects

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Targeting the right audience is just as crucial to a direct mail marketing campaign as avoiding those who are simply not going to respond to your offer.  What if your typical mailing list audience just read a profoundly influential or inspiring book such as Steve Jobs biography?  And in doing so, they experienced a paradigm shift in the way they think about technology, art, business philosophy, and ultimately, their interest in your product or service.  Can reading the right book affect the way you once responded to direct mail?  What about a movie, a lecture, and sermon, or late night conversation?  The answer is, of course, yes.

Considering how fast information flows through our online gadgetry, or streams pa...

Never before has the accuracy of auto vehicle data been more important to dealership direct mail.  The Driver Privacy Protection Act of 1994, as well as the Shelby Bill Amendment to this act, has virtually removed the ability to compile DMV data without the auto owners’ consent.  This study was undertaken to compare and contrast 4 different auto data sources. Each of these new sources contributes their own variation of compilation methodology, accuracy, and coverage.

Comparison / Verification Process Methodology

Source Files
The 4 automotive database sources selected were required to satisfy 3 criteria.

Making improvements to your mailing list criteria is easier than you think. Below are the insider recommendations that smart mailers incorporate into all their direct mail campaigns. Follow the directions and logic below and start seeing immediate lift in response rates and bottom line direct mail ROI.

Trade Practice # 1 – Capping Your List Select Ranges

Many first time mailers will intuitively select an age or income range based on what they think is the most targeted for their product or service offering.

As an example, suppose your business is a fine dining establishment and you want to promote a New Year’s Eve dinner celebrat...

Assembled disparate data in an effort to better understand a range of human behaviors.

Fair Isaac Co, the company that created and maintains the algorithm for determining an individual’s credit score, says they can predict, among other things, the likelihood that a person will take his or hers prescribed medication.  They call it the Medication Adherence Score and it’s the latest innovation in predictive mailing list data.

This new predictive data is one of several new predictive approaches to identifying cluster groupings from data collected from an individual’s credit bureau.  Experian PLC, also recently introduced their newest innovation with a mailing list product they call the Income Insight Score, which estimates the income of a credit...

According to the Small Business Association, a small business is defined as one that is independently owned and operated, is organized for profit, and is not dominant in its field. Depending on the industry, size standard eligibility is based on the average number of employees for the preceding twelve months or on sales volume averaged over a three-year period. When you’re considering a direct mail campaign to reach these business owners, direct mail marketers should consider the both the industry they are attempting to reach and the number of employee’s. In some instances, mailers should also consider the s...

If you use Satori Bulk Mailer to process your saturation resident mailing list, you’re likely finding your postage costs to increase. And chances are, as post offices closes continue, you can expect this to occur more and more. The Satori Bulk Mailer software will sort your list based on their most recent file update that Sortori have received. Sortori typically updates every 60 days, while the Postal Service releases their information every 30 days. So, any changes to carrier route boundaries will require re-sorting of the database, hence, throwing some files out of saturation. Any routes not fully saturated will incur a higher postage cost.

So how does this happen? What’s causing the changes, and who do mailers avoid th...