Targeted Mailing Lists: Impact Your Business Today

Back in the day, the process of purchasing a mailing list was fairly straightforward. A lot of mailing list brokers essentially sat down with the telephone book and typed out all the names and addresses from it. Some of the higher end brokers actually printed out mailing labels for you, but that wasn't the norm. Many a long-suffering clerk or secretary laboriously typed out names and addresses from long lists, formatting them into address labels and filing them as "masters" that could be copied, cut and pasted onto envelopes every time the boss wanted to send out a new marketing letter.

Even in those early days, some canny business owners made rudimentary attempts at targeting their direct mail. If you sold baby products, for example, you might approach a parenting magazine and offer to buy their subscriber list. The oil dealer might hook up with a real estate agent to get the names of new homeowners to whom he could pitch his services. More often, the company hauled bins of unaddressed mail to the post office, where postal workers fed them into big machines that pasted on address labels that sent them via bulk mail to the ubiquitous "Occupant."

Then came computers and databases and mail merge, making it easier to put together targeted mailing lists and customize marketing messages. Who doesn't remember how cool it was the first time you opened a sales letter and found your name printed on it? For the business owner - and his long-suffering secretary or admin assistant - the advent of databases made it possible to type in the names and addresses once, and print them directly to address labels time after time. Even better, business mailing lists started coming in on diskette and then CD, ready to be copied to your computer and used.

Of course, tracking responses - which is the best way to refine your marketing and target it more effectively - still meant lots of manual entry work. But that intensive labor paid off because the database of addresses yielded all sorts of information and allowed you to pull out just the information you wanted. Databases and mail merge programs meant you could pull out a list of patients who hadn't booked a dental appointment since last year sometime and send out reminders to just those people - and it only took a few minutes instead of a few hours to find the right addressees.

Today, you can go online and find mailing list brokers that allow you to customize the marketing lists you buy from them in hundreds of ways. Need a mailing list of 32-year-old pediatricians whose first names start with J? Chances are good you can find a list broker who can put one together for you, and every address on it will be valid and good. When you start from purchased, targeted mailing lists for your marketing campaign and add variable printing technology, the sky's the limit for customizing the marketing messages you send out.

If you'd like to see what purchased mailing lists and customization can do for your business, contact a mailing list broker to discuss the possibilities for your business. You'll be amazed at the possibilities.

To learn more about subjects like mailing list brokers please visit the web site at: http://www.marketing-lists-direct.com

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About the Author

+Chris Robertson is a published author of Majon International. All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2013 (Mon Jun 27 2011) Majon International. Majon International is one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing and internet advertising companies on the web. Visit their main business resource internet marketing web site at: http://www.majon.com