Direct Marketing B2B

1. Mine your customer list first
   
   Your best potential for new business sales, lies with companies you have already sold to. Make sure past and current customers know about all the services or products you offer, not just the ones they have purchased in the past.
   
   
2. Check existing customers for the right contact
   
   Look at the titles of your existing best customers. When selecting a new list for an acquisition campaign, focus on people with these same titles.
   
   
3. Set your criteria for recipients
   
   From your existing customers, choose the company attributes that appear most often. Company size and location, industry type, number of years in business . . . Then use marketing judgement to select the key criteria.
   
   
4. Make sure the list is current
   
   With the way we all move within organisations today, if the list you acquire is just 18 months old, it may already be up to 30% inaccurate!
   
   
5. Eliminate the duplicates
   
   Don't send the same letter to different people at the same company unless it is to different locations or the job titles are so different you decide it’s worth a try.
   
   
6. Always mail to a person, not a title
   
   Obtain accurate first and last names, with correct spelling and the titles of the intended recipients. If you have doubts about the data, verify it before you mail. Time invested upfront on getting the list right, always pays.
   
   
7. Clean up truncations
   
   Many lists are sold with truncated company names such as "co", "corp", "mfg" and many others. Others have truncated titles. Don't send out a letter to "John Smith, Treas." Or “John Smith, Pres." This practice will almost certainly send your envelope direct to the waste paper bin (WPB).

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