Mailing List Woes

“Chickens don’t have teeth”. That, along with a cartoon drawing of a chicken, was the only message on the front side of a postcard.  The backside displayed the name and address of the recipient and the name and phone number of an orthodontist. That’s it. No sales hook. No brand message. No marketing. Oh, and the recipient – a 14 year old girl.

All too often direct mail campaigns fail before they are even launched. In the very real situation just described the dentist had two significant problems before anything was mailed:

No Marketing

First, there was no marketing or brand message. Looking at the postcard there was no indication it was for a dentist. The back of the postcard only had the dental practice name and phone number. There was simply no reason nor was there any motivation to take action.

Unqualified Mailing List

Second, a good mailing list company will qualify the data to ensure it meets the needs of the advertiser. Having a quality list is the most important aspect of a successful campaign.  Our local dentist doesn’t know the recipient is only 14. She should have been qualified out of the list due to her young age.  A better mailing list provider would have worked hard to ensure that the list contained parents of children. In fact, they could qualify the list further to only send the mailing to parents of children between the ages of 8 and 18. While it’s not 100%… it’s close.

The dentist that sent the chicken-mailer probably has a great practice, but it didn’t come through in his marketing. Worse yet, his mailing list had not been properly qualified.  The mailing list is the most important aspect of having a successful campaign. A great product or service offering, sent to non-targeted prospects will nearly always fail. While a mediocre product sent to a very targeted list generally produces results. Combining great products with a highly qualified list opens the door to huge success.

KDMailing.com has a unique mailing list tool that allows anyone to sort through consumer and business mailing list demographics. If you’re an orthodontist and want to know how many households in your area have children of a certain age; you can quickly and easily pull that data. You can sort, sift, compare and get the number of leads for both business and consumer mailing lists.

For more information of how KD Mailing & Fulfillment can help your business launch a successful direct mail campaign give us a call (866-330-MAIL). Or test out our mailing list tool to see what kinds of opportunities are available in your industry.