Mailing Lists

Mailing lists day.

For the past few days, I’ve been working with list rental services, collecting quotes, choosing demographics, and signing forms, to make sure that we have 200,000 names ready at the mail house when our big mail piece is (finally) ready to go. I’ve run into a number of problems in doing this: 1. it’s taken nearly a week to come to a consensus on what types of names we want to purchase and how much we’re willing spend on them; 2. we’re not willing to spend much, which means taking a lot of time getting quotes and then declining the offers; 3. we need more free lists (my job) though the time to arrange trades for them is dwindling.

Decisions were finally made yesterday – yea! – so by the end of today all should be in order to be done by deadline. My organizationally inclined brain is pleased as the constant back-and-forth of the past week had been getting a bit frustrating and being the representative voice of indecision to the various list companies was making me look like I don’t have it together, which I hate.

Today I work on the in house mailing list. A list, which, despite having a few thousand bad entries, is not entirely disorganized. It shouldn’t take too much clean-up to get it ready for the mail house and the task, should give me a pretty mindless, relaxing morning.

A few things I’ve learned while working on collecting mailing lists:

- List services generally need a week to process an order, but can often do it quicker.

- Mailing lists are (usually) cheaper than email lists.

- When selecting demographics of a list “AND” is the assumed conjunction – creating a highly specified list. Specify “OR” if you want a collection of all the selected demographics.

- Lists can be marked by the mail house, showing you which lists are most effective in generating a return.

- List generally cost between 10 and 25 cents per name, with a minimum amount per order.