No Matter What You Do, Only Real Prospects Will Buy

Advertising is a numbers game. It always has been and it always will be. The real skill comes down to how you play your numbers. In traditional advertising, it comes down to your choice of media and how well the chosen medium reaches your prospects.

Traditional media does a lousy job of targeting your prospects, so the object of the game is to buy media that reaches the greatest audience for the fewest dollars. That mentality spells disaster for direct mail. The challenge in direct mail is to reach as viable a target as possible. In other words, the right list is far more important than the size of the list.

The real cost is the size of your mailing. If your mailing pieces cost 75-cents each, a 10,000 piece mailing is going to cost you $7,500. That is a horrendous price to pay if you mail to a list of uninterested people. Whether you mail to 10,000 or 100,000 uninterested people your results will be the same … zero. Therefore, the quality of the list is the all-important element in any direct mail campaign.

Even if you hire the best copywriter in the world and have the best offer possible, if you stint on the quality of your list, your mailing will fail miserably. That is because you are violating one of the basics of direct mail—mail only to interested prospects. To do otherwise means you are moving into the realm of traditional advertising, which involves shooting into the dark and hoping for the best.

How much should you pay for a list? That depends on who you want to reach, what you are selling, your average profit from a sale, and how well the list tested.

Once you have a good list, you can invest in adding other elements to your mailing with happy results. Hiring a good copywriter makes sense with a good list, since better copy will improve your results. Any previously tested and proven element will always work better with a good list. Always, always, always!

The true risk of a promotional effort is the corporate urge to cut costs. For space ads, it's the urge to cut copy, for media like radio or TV, it's airtime, and for mailings it's the cost of mailing lists. Cutting costs in any of these areas is a form of corporate suicide. Each of these cost-cutting acts will reduce the potential effectiveness of the promotion.

The lesson you must take from this is never let cost cutting determine which list you should use. Make sure that your list contains the names and addresses of real prospects. Real prospects are the ones who will open your envelope, who will read your letter, and who will buy your product. Sending mail to anyone else is waste of all that money you were trying to save.

Albert Saxon is president of Saxon Marketing, Springfield, MA.