Even the most carefully designed marketing campaign will go unread and have a poor response rate if the piece does not reach the appropriate audience. Not only does your campaign piece need to be top-notch quality, the target audience for your campaign must be right! The recipients need to be hand picked to increase the likelihood of the respondent taking action-whether that is making a phone call, going to a website or making a purchase. With fierce competition and people being inundated by marketing messages everyday, a direct marketer’s job is harder than ever and a targeted list is vital.

To ensure you have the appropriate audience for your campaign, you need to determine exactly who your audience is-who will act on your campaign. To do this, you need to examine your current customers. You will want to identify any similarities they may have by creating a profile analysis on the individuals who currently purchase your products or services. Do they tend to be male or female? Make a certain income? What products or services have they recently purchased? How often do they purchase services or products? How do they make purchases? After examining your current purchasers and identifying similar characteristics, you are ready to create a list for your marketing campaign.

Depending on how you access your marketing data, you may have the ability to simply create a list right from your analysis or you may need to create a query to pull a list from your marketing database. No matter how you pull your list, you will want to select individuals from your prospect and client marketing data that have the characteristics you identified in your analysis. In addition, you may want to suppress individuals who have recently purchased specific products or services and any individuals who have opted-out of the marketing channel you will be using for your campaign. You may also want to consider suppressing recipients of marketing campaigns from the past 30 to 60 days-to eliminate marketing list fatigue. As you learn more about your target market you may identify business rules that you will want to add to your marketing database solution. Adding business rules makes your solution more robust and even easier for you to pull targeted lists. The following lists some items you may want to consider as you evaluate your marketing database solution to determine new business rules to add.

– Pulling a list at the residence, household or individual level

– Ability to select specific geographic regions (e.g., zip codes within a 20, 50 and 100 mile radius, a group of cities or states, etc.)

– Accessing a list of services, products or categories to quickly select

– Adding criteria selections to help reduce fatigue (e.g., a select for individuals who have been included in a marketing campaign in the last 30, 60 and/or 90 days or adding criteria for 1-3 touches, 4-6 touches and/or 7-9 touches in the current year or in a lifetime

In addition, there are a variety of other items you may want to consider when pulling a list for your marketing campaign.

– Creating a control group

– Tracking marketing touches

– Testing specific criteria, creative or messages

– Adding promotion codes to specific campaign pieces for easy identification and analysis-clients versus prospects or individuals from specific data sources, etc.

– Suppressing specific previous lists, segments or opt-out lists

The bottom line is to fully utilize your marketing database and all of the marketing data it contains, while precisely defining and pulling your lists-optimizing the success of your direct marketing campaigns.

Author Bio: Jeff Barela Jeff is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer for Dovetail. Jeff has been in the database marketing industry for over 9 years and the database industry for over 15 years. Dovetail-The Marketing Database Company Jeff Barela jeff@dovetaildatabase.com 303.904.4771 www.dovetaildatabase.com.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: marketing database, direct marketing, database marketing, derived elements, database, dovetail