Business Mailing List Acquisiton

ProspectList.com can build a bespoke business mailing list to suit your company's needs and identify the best prospects to target for a direct mail campaign, by using company, financial and verified contact information. The information compiled by prospectlist.com will ensure that you are provided with a precision business mailing list that identifies best prospects matching your target market with senior contacts appended. Therefore a prospectlist.com business mailing list is the best way forward for you marketing database and business mailing list requirements.

As a fast growing business mailing list supplier, prospectlist.com is dedicated to providing your company with up to date, fresh information that forms that basis of your business mailing list. As part of a targeted mailing campaign, prospectlist.com's business mailing list service will provide you with the names and addresses of those contacts that are a senior decision maker within the company, thus enabling your company to carry out targeted marketing to the right people within the right companies.

What is a Company Director List?

A Company Director List is a list of company director names and company addresses of existing customers and prospects that are to be targeted for a direct mail campaign. These names and addresses should match the identified target market of the company carrying out the direct mail campaign. In order to be sure that the names and addresses within your Company Director List match your target market, prospectlist.com has built its business to business marketing database using a comprehensive range of variables that identify the best prospects for a direct marketing campaign and in particular a direct mail campaign.

What is Database Marketing?

The list, the creative and the proposal are the three important aspects of database marketing. In order to succeed, a campaign must first reach an audience who are likely to be receptive to purchasing your products or services. The selection of an audience in the form of a list is by far the most important aspects of a Database Marketing campaign. Eliminating lists with traits that are most obviously dissimilar to the traits of your best customers before commencing a campaign can often prove to be the difference in whether your next database marketing succeeds or fails.

Whatever the marketing budget, good quality database marketing is achieved by applying the most important measure of all…common sense. It can be sometimes difficult to get hold of lists that target the right decision maker but using telemarketing to build your own list might be a useful exercise before beginning database marketing.

One effective form of database marketing that has become popular in recent years is email marketing. Sending emails can not only generate extremely high level response levels, but do so far more cheaply than any other form of database marketing. Emails are quick and easy to open, but it is worth considering that as a prospecting tool, you do risk being associated with ‘spam’ and under new legislation you could run the risk of the breaking the law if you do not have explicit permission from individuals to email them as part of a database marketing campaign. Never-the-less, creatively, simple graphical emails are likely to give you a better response than text only ones and can be a cost effective form of communication for database marketing, not just to new prospects but to existing customers.

The Importance of Testing

Database marketing is very measurable, but it is not an exact science. The purpose of testing is to see which component parts might work better through change. Indeed, the most successful people in database marketing never stop testing. They are always striving to improve their results and know that what works today will not work forever. One of the biggest advantages of database marketing is that most of the channels can be tested before committing to a full campaign. Every test creates a body of knowledge that builds over time to make your database marketing more and more successful.

Logistics

Business to business database marketing does not just require financial resources but human resources too. Staff are needed to implement, manage and monitor database marketing campaigns, develop and maintain the databases and of course handle the additional business generated. That said, proper planning will give you an idea of the extra resources that might be needed for a database marketing campaign and when, and at what level, the extra expertise is required. Most potential suppliers will give you advice and help, to decide what to do.

What is Direct Mail?

Direct Mail is one of the more established methods of creating interest in a company’s products and/or services. Direct Mail is traditionally used by the B2B sector as the most continuous tool for acquiring prospective clients. The very basic rule of Direct Mail — or any outflow originating from your company, regardless of its quality — involves the quantity of Direct Mail letters.

The quantity factor of Direct Mail encompasses both the size of each mailing as well as the longevity of direct mail marketing. The response from Direct Mail is always marginal.

There are ways of ensuring that your Direct Mail letters achieve maximum attention and produce optimal response, but in general, the response rate will usually be between 1% and 3%. Direct Mailing can be profitable. Its emphasis should be on the qualitative aspects so that the prospects you receive are of high quality. Again, this is where using a company who provide information for Direct Mail will be advantageous in producing a comprehensive list of Direct Mail prospects to ensure at least this stage of a campaign is dealt with effectively.

"Forward-looking" companies still have Direct Mail as a key ingredient in their marketing mix. This is because Direct Mail still works. The principle behind any marketing campaign is to get Attention, to elicit Interest, generate Desire, and to move a prospect to Action (AIDA).

It is impossible to predict response rates for Direct Mail campaigns as it is very much dependant on the offer, the creative treatment and the timing of the Direct Mail.

Direct Mail has a number of key strengths including:

• The ability to target key decision makers by name and personalise direct mail communications to them.
• The chance to unleash artistic license and creative flair, with print and production technologies offering far more possibilities than in previous standard direct mail A4 or A5 pack.
• High recall for direct mail pieces that are well produced and a tendency to keep direct mail items of interest for later consideration
• Room to explain complex propositions, or guide your direct mail readers through a wide range of available options.
• There are also, however some key issues to bare in mind when commencing a direct mail campaign:
• The quality of the data you are intending to use in the direct mail campaign. On average, 20-25% of managers in larger companies’ leaves or change roles every year, so unless you can be confident that your lists are up-to-date, you could be wasting a quarter of your direct mail budget.
• The decision-making process. If your product or service is of particular value to accounts departments, it does not necessarily mean the financial director will be involved in the buying decision. The larger the organisation, the greater the chance the decision will be made by a middle or junior manager and if that is the case do you know who they are to target your direct mail campaign appropriately?
• Head Office personnel. While many direct mail lists focus on head office personnel, the individuals listed will not necessarily be involved in most operational decisions and the operating companies may be in a completely different location.

Read our Reasons why to use Direct Mail.

What are Data Fields?

Data fields are the variables that are to be applied within the selection criteria and included in the output of the prospect database. This can include contact and address information as well as other appended information such as telephone number, financial information, company information.