How We Lower Your Campaign Costs
The temptation to buy a quick, easy mailing list that will hit every address in town is high. You’re excited about the prospect of everyone seeing your offer and learning about your business.
Who cares if most people pitch your campaign postcard in the trash – it’s a game of numbers, right? The more addresses you hit, the greater the chance that some percentage of interested people will respond.
This may not be the best plan.
When you hit every doorstep you’re saturating the market and possibly spending unnecessarily on printing and postage. On the upside, saturation campaigns can build awareness and word-of-mouth. A grandmother who receives your offer about day care services may pass it along to her daughter who’s in the market for a new provider.
Saturation campaigns are also great when your offer is fairly universal and useful: you’re an auto repair shop with a great seasonal deal, a new hair salon, a new pet store. Even in those instances, there are ways to reduce your spend, assure you’re getting to the right customers, and increase your sales opportunities.
Know that not all ‘saturation’ lists are built the same, though.
The ‘Everyone In This Zip Code’ list you can purchase with a few clicks online may be filled with duplicate addresses and outdated information. You’re paying for all the addresses, including the bad ones – vacant homes, ‘do not deliver’ addresses. Having an expert build you the cleanest, most recent list, whether it’s a saturation or targeted list, can save you a lot of money.
So you have the list and it’s spiffy and ready to go. There’s another step that helps reduce cost and it’s reducing your postal spend. There are methods to reduce postal expense you may not be aware of. Your printer may not even know of them.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has a book of regulations and rates they use to assign cost to bulk mailings. It’s called Mailing Standards of the United States Postal Service and it’s 1,332 pages long.
If you arrive at the post office with your mailing boxes on a cart, they’re going to assign whatever costs they deem fit the job. While it may be the right price, it may not be the best price.
You have control over all these factors. Choose to work with a reputable list builder that can clean and fine-tune a list specific to your needs AND provide ‘pre-sort’ services to maximize your savings on postal cost.
The list builder’s goal is to find the best list of contacts with no duplicate entries, no dead or inaccurate addresses that delivers the best targeted customers in your trade area. Why send renters your springtime home improvement offer when you can get a targeted list of homeowners who live in homes older than 10 years with higher than average household income?
If we take a well-targeted list and optimize it for best postal rates, we’ve just made three positive changes with big impact:
1) Increased your chances for customer responses
2) Decreased list cost by lowering the list count
3) Decreased postal cost by optimizing through pre-sorting.
Before just hitting the button to order the ‘Every Address In These Zip Codes’ button, get a relationship with a qualified, expert list builder that offers pre-sorting services. It’ll save you money and increase your campaign return on investment.