Top 5 Problems With Direct Mail List Data and Tips to Overcome Them

Whether you’re considering a targeted direct mail campaign for the first time in your company’s history or you’re about to launch your thousandth one, your mail list data should be top of mind.

Given that the response rate to your mailout depends on clean, current data about recipients based on the filters you applied, it makes sense that you’d want to find a reliable source. Afterall, you can send an absolute masterpiece to as many empty houses as you can dream up, and you probably won’t get a single response.

So what can you do?

Well, it starts with knowing what to look out for. Here at Integra, we offer print management services for businesses small and large, and we’ve been doing so for nearly 20 years. And with comprehensive print services come full print and mail solutions, many of which have been targeted and tailored to the perfect audience.

Along the way, we’ve learned countless perks of direct mailing and targeted marketing…as well as, of course, some potential pitfalls. When data lists aren’t refreshed, contacts aren’t updated and you end up spending a lot of money on seeds that never sprout. And who wants that?

Our goal for you is that by the end of this top five list, you’ll know what issues you can run into with mail lists, keep an eye out for them and hopefully avoid them altogether by choosing data providers you trust.

1. Direct Mail Lists Without Regular Updates

The first major issue you’ll run into with an unreliable source of mailing data is what we’ve already mentioned, and what you’ve likely had your eye on from the start. You surely think about staying on the cutting edge with information about the kinds of people in the homes surrounding your business, because that’s how you can determine who might respond to your marketing efforts.

But what if you’ve already paid for mailing data, and it’s only been a few years? Can you assume most of the information is still accurate and just go with the same lists for your next direct mail campaign?

Technically, you could. Is it a good idea? Absolutely not.

Any list company worth their salt will update their lists much more regularly than every few years. People move to new towns, change professions or companies, have children, pass away and change in any number of other ways on a regular basis. If you send a postcard to someone’s house addressed to a person who has passed or moved, the current residents are unlikely to give you anything but bad press. And that’s if the USPS doesn’t bounce the mail piece before it goes anywhere in the first place!

2. Limited Filtering Options in Your Direct Mail Campaign

Age, household income, homeownership status, kids…these are all givens in the mail list industry. If you come across an offer that doesn’t allow for this type of filtering, you should run for the hills. Without this general and somewhat easy to find data, you may as well just choose an Every Day Direct Mail campaign or go with saturation mailing rather than curating a list at all!

But realistically, whether they have the bare minimum capabilities should not be your standard. Find a company offering lists with targeted filters that could be useful for your campaign. The fewer mail pieces you send out, the less you’ll have to spend. If you can use filters to determine just which community members will respond positively to your direct mail postcards, catalogs or pamphlets, you’ll save money by dodging waste.

Just a few of the direct mail filters you can add to your query if you work with a well-established and high-quality list company are those listed above as well as:

• Religious leaning
• Political leaning
• Hobbies
• Favorite foods
• Place of work
• And so, so many more

3. Overly Aggressive Parameters and Filters in Your Direct Mailing Lists

So we’ve already sung the praises of the filtering capabilities available in mail list curation. Now, we have to tap the brakes just a tiny bit.

Filtering to the right audience for your campaign can be a game changer, saving you money while drastically increasing your conversion rate and ROI. But filtering does come with a set of drawbacks that become more and more prevalent as you add to them.

The narrower you make your parameters, the more people you’ll cut out of your final list erroneously. Sure, you’ll cut many out who weren’t going to be great customers, but if you put lots of speculative filters in place — “loves Mexican food,” “has a senior dog” or “jogs in different parks around town,” for instance — you’re setting yourself up for a sparse list with few individuals meeting all parameters and many individuals missing out who would have been interested.

Bottom line? Start with the critical filters, play around with other filters to see how it affects your results, and ultimately choose just one or two hyper-specialized sets of parameters rather than a massive list.

4. Overzealous Promises About Business Data Lists for B2B Direct Mailing

When you’re selling direct to consumer — in other words, straight to a single person or family — you have a much better chance of error-free data than you would with business to business sendouts.

But if your company does both or focuses strictly on B2B, you’ll need to be extra diligent about your data and generally accept a larger average margin of error. Again, when a person dies, they’re listed on the record of deceased within one month, so a list curation company with responsible updating practices will learn that information in the next cycle and can pass it along to buyers like you.

There is no “dead businesses list” to pull from. We can’t access a quarterly report on all the small businesses that have gone under or been bought up by a bigger business. Large ones tend to show up in the news and by word of mouth, but when you get a mailing list for companies in your region or in a specific zone, remember that they’re not necessarily all active.

All that said, a good mail list company will still strive to provide you with the most accurate data available at the time. They should have a firm grasp on fluctuations in the markets you target and be able to tell you where they sourced the data, how often it’s updated and what the estimated margin of error might be.

5. Curating Your Direct Mail List Yourself Without Adequate Data

One question we hear a lot is, “Can’t I just find this mail list data myself by searching online?”

Valid question, and the answer is yes. You could absolutely compile your own mail list data based on your knowledge of the region and information you can find online. And don’t get us wrong — for some businesses, this is the way to go. If you want to personally send out a few letters, invitations or fliers to a small number of people and you have someone in your company who could handle the research and sending, you stand to save quite a bit of money.

As your mailing needs grow, however, or if you’re starting off with a requirement that far exceeds those outlined, you’ll almost always lose out by trying to curate all data yourself. Either you’ll spend an unprecedented amount of time trying to find the data, you’ll accept a list with a high level of inaccuracy or you’ll have to use old lists even as your mail campaigns grow and evolve.

In other words, you’re likely to lower your own impact and give the competition a leg up.

Go Forth to Your Direct Mail Success With Top-Quality Mail Lists

Sometimes the best laid paths still have bumps along the way, and the truth is that you could avoid every single one of the issues above and still run into a few headaches. Afterall, people aren’t perfect, data isn’t perfect, computers aren’t perfect — and mail lists are data compiled by people with computers. But an 80% improvement is a massive assist. Your 90% cleaner, more accurate, more recent mail lists will more than make up for the effort and overshadow any leftover margin of error.

In other words, keep an eye out for the potential mail list problems covered above, so that you can choose data from a company that works for your business and continues to serve your needs well past the first campaign. If you’d like to learn more about our mail list brokerage model or what it's like to work with Integra, now’s a great time to dive in.

And if we don’t hear from you, we hope you’ve learned what you came here to learn in this post, and that your next foray into the wacky world of targeted mailing data yields results and revenue your company could only dream of before now — without any bumps at all!