If there’s one question nagging on every business owner it’s, “How do I find more buyers?”  For most business owners, marketing professionals, and sales representatives, the answer is elusive, if not down right difficult.

For many, it’s easy to find more shoppers, but how do you find more buyers?  Add a free hot dog and some chips and you’ll get walk-in traffic on any weekend.  Offer a webinar with a value added proposition, you’ll get people signing up left and right.  But the buyers are really who you want to attract.  The buyers are those everyone can’t seem to find enough of.  The buyers are those who make the business stay in the black.  How do you find more buyers?  The answer is, in looking at your own database...

1. Usage reports

When renting a mailing list that’s a managed property, you can request a usage report before ordering. The usage report is a list of direct mail marketers who’ve tested the mailing list you’re considering. The usage report will also list those direct mail marketers who’ve not only tested the mailing list but have come back and ordered the mailing list again because the initial test direct mail campaign performed well.

By reviewing the usage report a new direct mail marketer can get a glance of other direct mail marketers who’ve either had success or failure. Those direct mail marketers who you recognize to be similar in product/service and offering, and who’ve had continuation on the mailing list, could be signaling that you...

1. Consider timing of your campaign
Your direct mail piece competes with the other mail pieces in the mailbox that day as well as the attention span of who you mailed the direct mail piece to.  In the summer months, the kids are out of school and families are busy with summer activities.  The weeks around December are filled with holiday activities that occupy a direct mail recipients attention that directly competes with the consideration of your mail piece.

2.  Consider the competition
How is your competition positioning themselves to the very audience you’re attempting to win business with?  What’s their offer, and is it similar to your offer?  Consider for a moment what the direct mail recipient considers when they receive your direct mail piece and...

Direct mail marketing for furniture store retail is essential to the success of maintaining foot traffic in furniture showrooms across any city. With heavy competition all vying for the attention of the too few buyers of residential furniture, the industry is liken to the auto dealership market. Like the auto dealership market, furniture stores sell most of their products on the weekend sales, offer financing, continually upgrade their merchandise, and attempt to position themselves differently amongst their competitors. The furniture store marketer integrates their brand message within the primary advertising mediums; direct mail, newspaper print, television, and online presence.

The direct mail marketing advantage

Direct mail marketing’s p...

Within the real of furniture store direct mail marketing, there exists a program that most retail future store direct mail marketers adopt, and that is the clearance sale.  The almighty “everything must go close out sale”.  This direct marketing program works best for the sheer fact that people are always on the hunt for new furniture and those people in close proximity will more likely drop in to take a look around.  But not all people will drop in and not all people are likely in the market.  So how does clearance sale direct mail marketer maximize his/her direct marketing return on investment?  How do we choose to add to our mailing list, those people more likely to become direct mail responders than those who likely won’t respond?  The answer is in a three part strate...

Careful consideration should be taken when determining who your direct mail audience is.  You may have the ideal direct mail offer that pulls at the heart strings of a good prospect, but if mailed to the wrong audience, the mail piece may end is zero sales leads.  Likewise, mailing to the perfect audience and with a lack-luster offer could also end in little to no sales lead response.

One way to define your direct mail audience is to through mailing list data modeling.  Data modeling is a process of using a mailing list of existing good customers to better understand who to mail to in order to find new customers.  Done correctly, data modeling can segment your existing customers as defined by what they’ve purchased, how frequent they purchase, and how much they spe...