• Be precise and eliminate wasted effort and expense.
  You can deliver your message directly into the hands of the specific individual or company you are targeting, which eliminates wasted effort and sales expense.
• Pre-test your prospect list.
  You can mail to a representative portion of your prospect list and be confident that the remaining list will respond similarly.
• Measure results and profitability.
  Your cost per respondent or lead, cost per order and overall profitability are easy to evaluate.
• Collect and analyze vital prospecting information.
  By recording each contact, response and order, you can develop a relationship with your prospects and customers, predict buying potential and fine-tune the information for future marketing campaigns.
• Control your sales efforts.

Define Your Objectives:
For a greater return on your direct mail dollars, first define your program’s specific objectives. For example, you may want your program to:

• Generate sales more cost effectively
• Contact more prospects at a lower cost per sale
• Produce qualified leads for your salespeople
• Penetrate territories not covered by your sales force
• Assist dealers with co-op mailings
• Build awareness of your products and services
• Conduct market research

Once your objectives are firmly in place, determine and direct your sales efforts to the types of businesses you want to reach.

Identify Your Markets:
To select your markets, first identify the industries that are buying your products and services now. A close examination of your existing customer base can reveal very useful information, such as lines of business and company size. Other companies with similar attributes may be good prospects. If you don’t have customer information, examine the markets that are most likely to need your products or services. Consider key characteristics such as line of business, company size and geography.

With your objectives and markets identified, you can now choose the mailing lists that will reach the best prospects and assure the largest return on your marketing dollars.

Select Your Best Prospects:
Consider the relative importance of these direct mail components to a campaign’s success:

• List – 60%
• Offer – 20%
• Copy – 15%
• Format (layout, type of envelope, etc.) – 5%

Nothing is more important than who you mail to! It pays to invest time and thought to obtain the best possible list of prospects.

Customize Your Mailing List:
Using powerful selectors, you can customize your list to increase the effectiveness of your mailing. Dun & Bradstreet suggests the following eight easy steps:

• Select the appropriate classification codes
  The government’s 4-digit SIC Codes let you target specific lines of business. Then by using D&B’s finer 6- and 8-digit industry designations, you can isolate and analyze business activity and fine-tune your prospect base with even more precision.
• Define your geographic coverage
  Identify the geographic area that will help you reach markets in a given territory by using these selectors: zip codes, entire U.S., selected states, Metropolitan Statistical Areas, counties, cities, telephone area codes.
• Determine the sales potential at each location
  Assess the buying potential of companies with multiple locations by defining the activity at each site. To reach top decision makers, focus on headquarters or subsidiary locations. Single location companies and manufacturing sites may have a separate need for your products or services. If only new companies and/or subsidiaries are your marketing target, you can select on the business start date. Use selectors to identify headquarters, branches, manufacturing locations, non-manufacturing locations, subsidiaries, single location companies and the year a business started.
• Reach the right executive
  Specify decision makers by title or functional responsibility, age range or gender.
• Pinpoint executives most likely to respond
  Look for selectors that allow you to select names and titles of proven mail responders. Target prospects by special interest or access subscribers, book buyers and seminar attendees.
• Cut the number of wasted telephone calls
  Telemarketing can play an important role in your direct mail program. To test the effectiveness, you can call a representative sampling.
• Identify new possibilities for higher profit
  Target the freshest prospects by choosing newly established companies just entering a market, new legal entities or recent changes in legal structures, changes in ownership, changes in CEO, company name changes, address and telephone number changes.
• Reduce mailing costs
  To further improve cost-efficiency, take advantage of postal discount options including Carrier Route Code, presort and bar coding. By sorting your mail and making it machine-readable before it gets to the post office you can save more on postage.