Yesterday I posted the idea of selecting a small number of suspects and concentrating a great deal of effort upon them. Wisely, one of my readers asked how someone might go about finding this perfect list of “hot suspects.”
The perfect mailing list, as I call it, is generally made up by merging two lists. The first list is demographic in nature, the second is a list that holds the key to some purchasing behavior. But, the act of creating this perfect list is merely a nice guessing game if you can’t identify and create a crystal clear picture of who or what is an ideal client for your business.
So, your ideal client profile is the what, your perfect list building strategy is the how.
For example: My ideal client is a successful business owner with 10-50 employees who has discovered how to acquire business but wants to take the business to the next level (in fact, these are the exact words many of my clients have uttered). This client values professional service providers and consultants and has come to realize that they cannot continue to push marketing ahead without external help. They are book readers and students of business. They often have purchased one or more training programs and employ the services of accountants, attorneys, financial planners and executive coaches. They typically belong to professional trade or industry groups and take leadership positions in those organizations.
Now, I know that was a mouthful, but can you picture this person? Do you personally know someone that fits that description?
With that description in hand I can go out to a company like InfoUSA or GoLeads and order up a mailing list that fits this description for any geographic select I wish.
But, to really make this list a “hot suspect” list, I add another list with my purchasing variables. Above I mentioned that my ideal clients are readers, students of business and have purchased training courses. Birds of feather, flock together and buyers of similar products and services are birds of a feather. Crack the “buying behavior” code and you will have a list that is pure gold. In other words, it’s hard to convince someone who has no history of buying something similar to what you offer that they should buy your product or service. However, if you can locate suspects that have a track record of purchasing goods and services like yours, your marketing job will be much easier.
So, in my case, I head on over to the SRDS (a list of over 10,000 catalog and in-house mailing lists) and find a very large list of fairly expensive business training program buyers and merge it with my list of ideal business owners to produce the Perfect Mailing List.
This approach increases the cost of your mailing list but reduces the overall size of your mailing list and allows you to focus only on those that have proven they value this type of service
