The number one factor to direct response success is your list. Send an offer for snow tires to a Grandma in Florida in Summer, and you have zero chance of success. Send the same offer to a Canadian who drives a four wheel drive and who last bought tires a couple of years ago, and your chance of success jumps.
There are two types of lists: House Lists and Rental Lists.
House Lists
Most companies have customer, lead, and/or prospect information in a database and want us to maximize the revenues from these people. These lists are free to use, but this internal data gets old quick.
- 3% of Americans move every month.
- 706 firms move locations every two hours.
- Mailing to the wrong person kills ROI, so data hygiene is important
We can fix a lot of these data issues by running our lists through NCOA (National Change of Address), FASTforward, and CASS. Most mail houses will do this automatically to help you save money. Also, don't forget to run your list by your "Do Not Mail" File and check for duplicates before you mail!
Rental Lists
There are many lists available to us –both compiled and subscription lists. Compiled lists are summary lists from multiple sources. Subscriber lists are lists directly from one source (e.g. a magazine). Some lists are better than others. That is why we test them against each other. We once found that ~30% of eBay’s prospecting list was junk.
Each list has a total Universe Size and a Base CPM (cost per thousand) of about $50-250/ thousand names. But this Universe can be narrowed through selections (such as number of employees). These selections increase the list rental expense.
About Data Cards
Each list source has a corresponding Data Card. These Data Cards include additional information on the list source(s) and information on available selections and the additional expense related to that selection. Unfortunately there is no standard selection criteria and the selections available vary by list source.
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