Would you like to increase response rate without changing what you mail? Whether you are doing online marketing by email or direct mail marketing in the postal mail, the techniques to increase response are the same.

It’s all about the list.

While it’s obvious you wouldn’t try to sell steaks to vegetarians, you might be doing similar in a more subtle way now.

By doing a bit of customer and list profiling, it’s actually relatively easy to double or triple increase response rate.

Database companies are very sophisticated about how they can do this these days.  They can “append” hundreds of characteristics to your customer records and then do a complicated analysis to determine which of those characteristics are predictive.

If you have a large list and acquire new customers by direct response methods it’s probably still worth it.   If by profiling your customers and then targeting those characteristics in your customer acquisition mailings, you could get a 10 times better response.

While using database companies to do this for you can be quite expensive, if you have a small list, you can do simple levels of this yourself using criteria like state, age, sex, or income level.

I once had a mail order catalog company called Expressions, and we sold children’s premiums to medical offices and hospitals.

By calculating how many customers we had in each state as a percentage of the number of medical offices in each state, we were able to identify our best and worst states.  Going forward with our prospecting in our best states only better than tripled our response in prospecting.  That was a huge money-maker!

Checklist To Increase Response Rate

1. Start collecting more data about your customers

2. Have a database company do some basic appending or additional characteristics to your customer file

3. Look yourself for any obvious things your best customers have in common

4. Have a professional profile done by a database company – prices vary widely depending on size of file and complexity of the profile. Contact me if you’d like help.

Resources Mentioned In Video To Increase Response Rate

Standard Rate and Data – they publish a comprehensive directory of all the mailing lists on the market you can rent.  The resource you are looking for is called the Direct Marketing List Source.  They have both a BTC and a BTB version.

NextMark – a free online tool to do list research

Who’s Mailing What – a comprehensive source to actually see samples of what is being mailed in hundreds of industries and what’s working and what’s not.

Call me anytime at 720-890-8760 if you would like help with any direct response type project.