27 ways to maximise profits from a mailing list - part 1

13 February 2008

Lift response, decrease costs and avoid problems with your mailing list

A good broker will help you avoid poor lists and maximise profits from the best lists. In general you should seek out the broker with the most experience in your marketplace. Whilst they may be also working for your competitors, they are best placed to see you find the best lists.

1. Gone aways (also called ‘nixies’)
Even an up to date subscription list will generate 1.5% ‘gone aways’ and a well maintained buyers list around 3%. Some poorly maintained lists are as high as 10%, which is unacceptable. Most list owners give 20p refund for every gone away returned over 4% but may only count the official Royal Mail returns as gone aways.

2. When poor data can be worth mailing
There are still direct marketers who are very poor at entering data. However, while the appearance of their lists may look bad these lists can still be stars when it comes to response.

3. Avoiding dishonest list owners
Some unscrupulous list owners have been known to supply 5,000 names from their very best, most recent multi buyers, pretending it to be a random selection. Then when the mailer rolls out 25,000 the response rate shrinks dramatically. To avoid this, select by random postcodes over the country.

4. Renting a list for a second use
Most list owners/managers are prepared to offer one third off if you take the same names again to promote the same product within a three-month period. Phone and negotiate the option to do this before the first list rental.

5. Data overlays
It is possible to overlay extra information on certain lists to select certain housing types (Mosaic, Acorn, etc) investors, those with county court judgements (possible to include or exclude). It may be worth using for refining a big list that doesn’t pull enough response in its present form.

6. Mortality file
A list of dead people, taken in the main from published wills, is available to ensure you do not cause distress to the relatives of the deceased. While the speed the data takes to come on stream is improving, the cost of finding a tiny number of people means that this option is not currently widely used.

7. Hot names
The best names on a list tend to be the most recent buyers. Normally three months is the oldest any hotline name should be. When you are testing a concept many mailers keep their risk to a minimum by using hotline names only. However, you then need to be careful not to roll out without testing an nth selection from the balance of the files that worked.

8. Nth selection
This denotes a random selection that’s needed to test a list before risking mailing the full quantity. The term comes from 1 in N – if you want to test 5,000 from a 100,000 list you would be given 1 name in every 20.

Mike Chantry, the Managing Director of Hilite Direct Marketing Services provided the insider tips for this article. Hilite is the leading list owner and manager in its field. The Hilite annual lunch, held at the Institute of Directors in London, is a who’s who of Internet and direct marketing entrepreneurs, copywriters and subscriptions marketing experts. You can spend months trying to discover what products are currently bringing in the most money for direct marketers, but after a couple of glasses of wine those hard-nosed business people at the Hilite lunch will tell you for nothing.

Hilite clients are a loyal bunch and you can see the same faces year after year. They all rely on Hilite’s personal approach, which is only possible because Mike Chantry comes from a publishing background. This kind of personal guidance is unusual in the mailing list broking business.

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Click here for Hilite mailing list article part 2

You can see the Hilite website at:

Hilite web site.