What is the best way to reach your audience and create a relationship with them? We offer Advertising Mailing List, industry leading Consumer Lists solutions, Targeted Sales Leads information, and Internet Lead Generation tips. See Consumer Marketing. Indented Paragraphs is a great way to use indentation. One of the few other ways to emphasize something in the body of a letter is to box it or float it in the center of the page by indenting both sides. An indented paragraph—at about the middle of the first page—is a good place to state the offer. Like other forms of emphasis, use this sparingly. If you only indent one or two paragraphs in the whole letter, they'll stand out. If nearly every other paragraph is indented, nothing will be emphasized. The conclusion and Call to Action is that people often look at the end of the letter to see what you want them to do. Sum up the benefits and tell the reader how to respond. National Change ofAddress (NCOA) Processing. If you don't use a service bureau but maintain your own lists or database on your computer, you can still use NCOA processing and get it at a reasonable cost from a firm licensed by the U.S. Postal Service. Cost is $4.75 per 1,000 with a $25 minimum. You can send in your list on diskettes or any of several types of removable hard-disk cartridges. Alternatively, you can save time by sending your list via modem. For the address and phone number of this service see phone appending. |
Consumer Lists
Mail the same offer to different lists. (Actually, you just mail to samples of names from large lists.) Direct mail offers different offers to different sets of names taken from the same list. Print ad offers can allow you to create two ads with different offers. A magazine or newspaper will print one ad in half of their issues and the other in the other half of the issues. This is known as an A–B split test.To compare samples of two lists, every recipient on both sample lists should receive the same mailing, promoting the same offer, at the same time of the month. The environment and conditions for each mailing should be as critical as possible. By doing this you try to control intervening variables which ay influence a test without your knowledge.
Random selection of names on a list to be tested is also important to maintain your control of variables and give you valid test results. In testing one list ainst another, for example, you want to see how responsive an entire list is sampling a portion of each list. You wouldn't want to select groups of peoe from the list according to the neighborhoods they live in, because the area residence would be an additional variable.
And, as we have seen, where one lives reflects other differences in demographics and buying preferences. You could do a test mailing to determine which areas of the nation, state, or city are most responsive to your offer, but then the geography would the variable, not the choice of one list over another.
Testing means different things to different people, depending on how they use direct marketing.