Questions I hear from business owners about mailing lists
“Who should I mail to?”
People often come to me asking for a mailing list.
My first question is usually, “Tell me about your business.
What are you trying to accomplish?”
Are you trying to bring in new regular customers?
Promote a grand opening?
Get people to discover a location that’s a little hard to find?
Those are different goals, and they can call for different audiences.
Before we start picking ZIP codes or drawing circles on a map, let’s talk about who you serve and what would make someone want to visit you.
“Should I target new movers?”
Sometimes!
I was just talking with an orthodontist who wanted a new mover mailing.
After we talked about who she needed to reach, I suggested instead that she target households with children ages 7 to 13.
Only a small portion of people in your town need orthodontics, and the audience most likely to need it is children ages 7 to 13, not necessarily families who have just moved in.
There’s a much larger group of local families with kids in that age range who may be ready for an orthodontic evaluation.
For a pizza shop, coffee house, salon, or hardware store, new movers can be a great fit.
These people are finding their places and building new routines.
You have an opportunity to become part of those routines.
But they come in gradually.
If you need to drive traffic quickly for an event or grand opening, we should talk about neighborhood saturation mailing.
“How far away should I mail?”
Somebody might drive ten miles to see a dentist they like.
They probably aren’t driving ten miles for a pizza, especially when there are plenty of options closer to home.
For a coffee house, we want people who can easily make you part of their day.
Are you near their house?
On their route to work?
Convenient for that afternoon coffee run?
The owner usually has a good idea of where their customers come from.
That’s where we start.
Then we look at the community, the competition, and anything that makes getting to you inconvenient.
A freeway can be a psychological barrier.
Once someone leaves downtown after work, they may have no interest in crossing back over, even if your business looks close on the map.
“Can we use the customer list I already have?”
Absolutely!
If you have a customer list with addresses, we can use it to create a heat map showing where your customers are coming from.
Maybe there’s a cluster in a neighborhood you hadn’t considered.
Maybe people are traveling farther to visit you than you thought.
That gives us a useful starting point for deciding where to reach new customers.
We can also mail to your existing customers.
That’s a different conversation: what would give them a reason to come back?
Your customer list can help with both.
It depends on what you want the mailing to accomplish.
“Do I have to mail to an entire ZIP code?”
No.
We have options!
We can look at a radius around your location, a seven-minute drive time, a custom area, full ZIP codes, or selected carrier routes.
A carrier route is a postal delivery area within a ZIP code.
It lets us focus on particular parts of the community rather than treating the whole ZIP code as one audience.
We can also consider single-family or multifamily housing when that matters for your business.
And you get to see it on a map.
That’s the fun part.
Suddenly, we’re looking at your actual neighborhood and talking about where your next customers might come from.
Seven-minute drive time
“What if people don’t know where we are?”
Then let’s help them find you.
Maybe your location is tucked behind a shopping center.
“Look for us behind the Walmart” might be more useful than an address alone.
I ask about things like that because the mailing list and the message need to work together.
We want to reach people who are a good fit, give them a reason to visit, and make getting there easy.
Not sure who you should mail to?
You don’t need to figure it out before we talk.
Tell me about your business, who you serve, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
We’ll look at the options together.
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