The Fitness Professional’s Guide To Mailing Lists

By Eric Ruth

I get a lot of questions about how to best acquire and use mailing lists.

Right now I’m going to reveal the secrets to understanding, choosing and using mailing lists for maximum profit in your business.

There’s GOLD in great lists, but you need to really educate yourself or you can make costly mistakes.

A study by Pitney-Bowes revealed that 60% of small business owners do not use direct mail; but, of the 40% who do, 90% say it is the most productive means of marketing they employ. This shows you how using direct mail effectively give you an instant, significant advantage over all your competitors.

My “full-time” gig used to be as a direct response marketing copywriter. In the past 5 years, my clients have mailed over 3,000,000 of my letters. That’s not an exaggeration. Direct mail is a HUGE business, and many people are quietly getting rich using it.

It remains second only to television advertising as the most widely used form of marketing.

You do NOT have to be a big-time player to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities direct mail provides.

And lists are the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT component of any direct mail effort. The hierarchy of importance goes like this:

The list
The offer
The creative (the copywriting)

List selection is the most important thing you can do to ensure your success using direct mail.

Most people goof this up, relegating list selection to the end, and not doing the critical investigative work that’s essential for a profitable campaign.

So Here’s The Fitness Professional’s Guide To Mailing Lists

There are basically two types of mailing lists for rent:

Compiled lists
Response lists

Compiled lists are the lowest on the totem pole of value. They are compiled from public records, and all you know about these people is basic demographics; like age, income, and homeowner.

These lists can be made to work, they are the least expensive and they are easy to get.

But you will almost always be better served investing your time, energy and money in renting high quality response lists.

I say time and energy – as well as money – because one of the most important things for you to do is to spend the time and energy EDUCATING yourself about mailing lists. There are tens of thousands of lists available. You can basically get whatever you want:

A list of 38 year-old divorcees who own a dry cleaning business in California and drive Toyota’s can be obtained!

As Dan Kennedy says, “privacy in America is dead!” If you want a highly specific list – you can get it.

Response lists include buyers or subscribers who have RESPONDED to particular offers, thereby indicating interest in a particular subject like weight loss or fitness. These people have either inquired about or paid money to get related products or services by responding to ads, direct mail or catalog offers.

The very fact that these people have responded to an offer is of critical importance. Some people on compiled lists may meet your demographic requirements, but they may not RESPOND to direct mail. So your investment in reaching them is wasted.

Obviously we want to minimize waste, but it’s important to understand the biggest, costliest waste in direct mail is in printing, postage – AND LACK OF RESPONSE TO YOUR OFFER.

So if you rent a 5000 name response list (that’s generally the minimum number you must rent) that costs you $100 per thousand names (that’s an acceptable average cost for a good response list), but because your business is geographically limited, you may only find 300 names on that list in your area, therefore you will have 4700 wasted names.

That’s seems bad.

But it’s nothing compared to the waste incurred in renting a compiled list of homeowners who earn at least $150,000 and then mailing to 1000 of them.

Because the likelihood of getting excellent results from your 300 names from the response list is much greater than the likelihood of getting excellent results from 1000 compiled names – and it’s also a lot less expensive in terms of lead cost and quality of the leads.

Look at the numbers.

COMPILED LIST:

1000 names at $65 per thousand = $65 rental cost

Printing of two-page sales letter:

1000 X $0.06 = $60
Envelopes = $20
Postage = $370
List = $65

Total = $515

“Good” response = 1%
1% = 10 leads

Lead Cost (total cost divided by number of leads): $51.50

Quality of leads: ???

RESPONSE LIST:

5000 names at $100 per thousand = $500 rental cost

Names in your geographical area = 300

Test mailing to 300 names

Printing of two-page sales letter:

300 X $0.06 = $18
Envelopes = $7
Postage = $111
List = $500

Total = $636

“Good” response = 5% (with the right offer)
5% = 15 leads

Lead Cost (total cost divided by number of leads): $42

Quality of leads: Very good!

Not only is your lead cost lower using a response list, the QUALITY of your leads is generally MUCH, MUCH better.

Even though you had 4700 names on the response list you didn’t use (although, if you’re marketing PRODUCTS as your front-end or you offer a service like phone coaching, you can still use the other 4700 names), you still end up with much better numbers!

And allow me to reveal the NUMBER ONE BIGGEST SECRET TO BEING A GREAT MARKETER:

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR NUMBERS!

Marketing is about ARITHMETIC!

YOU MUST KNOW YOUR NUMBERS.

How to get great response lists:

Go to your public library and ask the reference person to show you the Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) reference books.

Spend the time to familiarize yourself with these amazing reference books. They contain pure GOLD.

You will find almost every list available for rent. It’s an amazingly powerful tool for your business.

You can write directly to the list owner/manager/broker and request the DATA CARDS on specific lists you’re interested in. These cards give you all the pertinent information you need to make a decision. In some cases you can get a copy of the exact offer the people on the list responded to. This can be very, very valuable because you then have a MODEL of what works. And you can tailor your marketing piece to the exact specifications of what these people want.

Or you can shortcut this process by contacting a list broker from your yellow pages. I don’t recommend this approach to beginners because you can easily be taken advantage of if you don’t first educate yourself about what’s available.

Plus, list brokers don’t give much time or attention to small time operators. They’re understandably after the big fish.

If you are really interested in educating yourself, you can buy a great book at your bookstore called A Small Business Guide To Direct Mail by Lin Grensing, published by Self-Counsel Press (about $12).

Generally speaking, if you can DEFINE who you want to reach (to do that simply look at your existing clients) by their age, sex, income, magazines they read, credit cards they carry, other products they’ve bought, etc., you can get response lists of people that match that description.

No list is 100% deliverable. Up to 10% of a list can change addresses every month. So you should ask how often a list is cleaned and updated. You may want names of a certain recency – magazines often offer “hotline names” of very recent subscribers, for example. Hotline names will almost always out-pull regular names. Because you’re reaching people when they are in “heat.”

Each list will offer different “selects” which are options like homeowners vs. renters, men or women, income, age, etc. The SRDS will show you which selects are available with each list.

Investigating the SRDS will undoubtedly stimulate your creative ideas and open your eyes to the immense opportunities and possibilities available to you.

Always, always TEST the list you rent. If you only get 300 useable names (as in the example above) then you would want to mail the entire 300. But if you have a response list of 1000 or more names, then you should test in 500 name chunks.

Again, selection is the number one “insider’s secret” to success with direct mail. When you can find the ideal list and tailor your marketing message and your offer to fit the list, YOU WIN.

For this reason, time, energy and money wisely invested in obtaining high quality, high probability lists pays BIG dividends.

What lists do you want?

In general terms (you need to do the exercise of finding out the specifics by STUDYING the SRDS), you are looking for lists of people subscribing to:

Weight Watchers and other diet/weight loss magazines
All Fitness related magazines
People who have purchased home fitness equipment
People who have joined a gym/club
People who have gone to “fat farms” or other health/fitness related “spas”

Essentially almost anyone who fits your ideal client profile who has responded to an offer for health/fitness/weight loss products/services (but beware of people who respond to those “hyped” quick-fix weight loss gimmicks – these people don’t generally understand that effective weight loss requires WORK).

Remember, it’s not enough to rent a great list, you also need to TAILOR your offer and your copy to the list.

Conclusion: When you advertise to the general public or mass mail by zip, you incur substantial waste in hopes of hitting the few people interested in your services at this moment in time. By using good lists, you redirect that money into communicating only with “high probability” prospects. In a sense, you “piggyback” on the investments other marketers have made to acquire those customers.

And finally – NONE of your competitors will get smart about using mailing lists effectively, so it can be an immensely profitable investment of your time, energy and money.

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