Marketing Your Business through Direct Mail

Most marketers will agree that you can best grow your business by building relationships with your existing customers through repeat business and word of mouth. When you need to increase market share, one way to promote your business beyond your existing customer base is through direct marketing. Direct marketing, or sending promotional messages directly to consumers, may include telemarketing, direct mail, fax or e-mail.

Where do you obtain lists of potential customers? Again, turn to your existing customers. Where do they come from? What are their income demographics? Are they mostly professional women or blue-collar men who like country music? Mailing list brokerage firms can provide lists that match the special customer niche you are trying to reach. These companies can be found in our yellow pages or through the Direct Marketing Association. Mailing list brokers rent consumer and business-to-business marketing lists. Databases are compiled from subscriptions to magazines, school enrollments, yellow page directories, and other sources. Names can be bought and extracted based upon geography, title/function, gender, income or other special criteria depending upon the list’s makeup. Your local broker will work with you to find the right list for your business.

SBDCNET has access to InfoUSA’s RefUSA, a database of businesses. Due to price and software limitations, we are limited to supplying no more than 50 company names per request. We also only provide data on competitors and possible suppliers for your client’s company.

We do not have access to consumer listings, but we can provide information on lists that may fit your client’s criteria through the SRDS marketing list catalogue. Each listing contains information on the list owner or broker, how the data was compiled and from what sources, total number of names and prices per thousand records. The listing will also contain information on the number of records by type if the list can be divided according to other criteria (such as title, ZIP code or state, etc.). You can then contact the list broker/owner to rent the mailing list.

See marketing for further information.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Small Business Administration under Award Number SBDC-CLH-2004-01. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations are those of the SBDCNet and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. SBA.

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SBDCNET
UTSA Institute for Economic Development
University of Texas at San Antonio
501 W. Durango Blvd.
San Antonio, TX 78207
http://sbdcnet.org/
sbdcnet@utsa.edu
800.689.1912