Des Moines Register - Later, a sympathetic co-worker pulled up old e-mails and showed Quick that his name was no longer on the mailing list, which meant he was not getting updates on company products and services, company benefits, or other personnel information. Quick …
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ZDNet UK - One of the key figures behind the Red Hat Linux distribution transferred his allegiance to Ubuntu this week, sparking a storm of anger. Using a popular Linux mailing list , Eric Raymond rubbished Red Hat’s free distribution, Fedora, and issued a …
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Santa Paula Times - We are trying to locate you for a 35-year reunion BBQ mailing list. We are trying to locate you for a 35-year reunion BBQ mailing list. Please call Craig Seabaugh at 805-659-3054 or send an email to drseadog2@aol.com with your contact information
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by: Joy Gendusa
You can use great design and copy to get a better response.
When you send a mailing to your customers or prospective customers you are counting on making considerably more money in new business than you spend on the mailing, right? It is obvious that if you were not going to profit from the mailing, you wouldn’t send it out.
A little less obvious is that it costs almost the same amount of money to send out a very attractive mailing piece with brilliant copy which is more likely to produce a great response rate as it does to send out a boring, poorly designed piece guaranteed only to land rapidly in the trash. Why?
The major part of your expenditure is in the mailing list and the postage. The printing costs are about the same for a perfect card as for a mediocre one. All right. So a good design and excellent copy is going to cost a little bit more. But only a little. You send out a postcard mailing to get a response (preferably lots of responses).
The front of the card, graphic and headline, is designed to attract the reader’s interest so that they read what you have to say. In short, to attract his or her attention.
The copy on the front and back of the card is designed to get the reader to respond, either by calling you or e-mailing you or visiting you or going to your web site. A response.
If your card accomplishes that, it’s done its duty.
How do you get it to do that?
Good design. Good copy. Assuming you have sent the cards to people who are likely to be interested in what you have to sell. (There’s no point sending a postcard selling raincoats to people in the Sahara Desert. They are the wrong “public”).
It is more cost effective in the long run to hire a professional to do the design and copy for your promotion instead of spending all the time yourself to learn the software. A little time spent improving the design and copy of your postcards will result in much higher ROI (Return On Investment) for your postcard mailing.
About the author:
Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998; her only assets a computer and a phone. In 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employs over 60 persons. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at www.postcardmania.com
ZDNet Blogs - … for Eclipse’s next major release (”Europa”), planned for June 2007. Dan and Markus will co-lead the project. Anyone who wants to help develop or test the installers can find more information, including a newsgroup and developer’s mailing list, at the …
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Forbes - An older mailing list may not have the updated “opt out” information on your customers, Fubini says. “You need to test your ‘opt out’ process–validate it by signing up for it and opting out to see if it works,” he says. “It’s due diligence on your …
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WTOP Radio - The letter claims to be from a lawyer who states this scheme is legal because you ask to have your name put on a mailing list. The letter also tells you that you can make even more money by purchasing a list of names from a company. After you send …
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ZDNet India - The vulnerabilities were described earlier this week in postings to a popular security mailing list by researcher Michal Zalewski. Each browser could enable miscreants to grab data via malicious websites, Zalewski said. In addition, another Firefox …
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by: Joy Gendusa
The right direct mailing list targets people who want your product or service.
The direct mail mailing list is a key factor in a successful direct mail marketing campaign and a major point to consider in small business marketing strategies where marketing ROI (Return On Investment) is a key concern.
What really makes your direct mail marketing and advertising campaign successful?
The biggest single factor in the success of your direct mail marketing strategy is who you send your mailings to.
A. You need a list.
This can be:
1) a list of existing customers or prospects who have inquired as a result of any of your marketing efforts or
2) a list which you purchase or in some cases obtain for free.
B. The mailing list must contain the names of people who are likely to be interested in the benefits of your products or services.
Don’t try and sell beer to the Temperance Society or real estate to people who cannot afford it. You have to target your direct mail marketing efforts.
What kinds of lists are available?
C. The three basic kinds of lists that you can use are (you can use all three):
1. Your own list of prospects and customers. This is a list that you collected with your own personal marketing efforts. This is known as a house list. These people are most likely to respond to your offers, because they have responded in the past.
2. A response list is a list of people that have actually done something. They have either purchased something from the people who put together the list or inquired in response to some offer or asked to be on the list. They have some level of interest in the topic or purpose of the list.
These people have not previously responded to you, but they have responded to someone in a related area (if you have purchased a correctly targeted list) so you know they are at least warm.
This is a direct mail mailing list you can purchase from the owner of the list (such as a magazine or company) or a list broker.
3. A compiled list is a list of people who were selected to be on the list because they possess the characteristics that you asked the list broker to screen for.
Examples of characteristics used to target correctly may include age, sex, geographic location, income level, etc. These are more fixed characteristics than response list characteristics, which are behavioral characteristics.
Case study: California based Sun Pacific Mortgage’s Forest Tardibuono found a great way to get the right direct mail mailing list for his company which has a very successful direct mail marketing strategy based on postcards and direct mail mailing lists.
“The title companies give us the mailing labels free. I’ll tell them we want all the homeowners in 95401 which is a zip we get most of our business from. So they’ll give us the mailing labels of anyone who is a homeowner from that lists. It saves money on labels and mailing lists.
They’ll even limit searches to specific categories such as all homeowners from that zip who got a loan from certain companies and they’ll do the search according to that so I can really target the public so that the mailing will be more effective.”
Mailing lists, correctly targeted, can make the difference in a mediocre promotional campaign to a wildly successful promotional campaign. It really just depends on what you are willing to have – success or mediocrity. So which is it?
About the author:
Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998, her only assets a computer and a phone. By 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employed over 60 people. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at www.postcardmania.com
Silicon.com - Microsoft and Mozilla are each working to tackle recently disclosed security flaws in their respective web browsers. The vulnerabilities were described last week in postings to a popular security mailing list by researcher Michal Zalewski. Firefox …
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