Keeping Your List Clean and Green
With any mailing, 'green' or not, it is essential to be smart about your mailing list. It is often said in direct mail marketing that your list contributes 40% to the success of your campaign. A bad list can contribute 100% toward your failure. Therefore, it makes sense to spend time and resources to ensure that you are sending your message to the right people. Now, there is even more motivation to focus on your list. You can help save our precious natural resources. Although it may not seem like it would make a big difference, mailing just a few duplicates or to a few bad addresses, can significantly impact the amount of waste produced.
Two components need to be considered when working with your mailing list. First, are you mailing to the right people? Second, do you have the most up to date, correct address information? If the answer to either of these is no, than most likely you are wasting resources and money.
The best way to ensure that you are mailing to the correct list is to spend some time carefully identifying the goals of your direct mail campaign. What is the message you are trying to send? Are you trying to target a specific audience? Why mail to all addresses within a certain area if you are only marketing a product that would appeal to people over the age of 50. The possibilities are endless when creating your list. List research can be done to ensure that you are reaching the right people.
Next, you can ensure the validity of your mailing list addresses by utilizing several processes. National Change of Address (NCOA) processing can be done to ensure that you have the most current address of those people on your mailing list. Your list can be matched against this file kept by the United States Postal Service to update any moved addresses from the previous four years. Also, Delivery Point Validation (DPV) processing can be done to validate your addresses and ensure that the addresses are in the correct format for delivery. Cleaning your addresses prior to mailing saves you time and money, as well as helps contribute to 'green' marketing.
Now that you are mailing to the right people at the right addresses, you can start designing your mail piece in a 'green' way.