6 Tips for Determining Your Target Market for Direct Mail

Identifying your target market is the first step in any successful direct mail marketing campaign. In fact, target marketing will give you the power to direct your marketing budget in ways that benefit you the most. It also allows you to send out brand messages to a well-defined audience that is more likely to respond to you than any other group. Direct mail targeting is one of the most affordable, efficient and effective ways for you to reach your prospects and grow your clientele.

What is a target market and why is it important?

Your direct mail target market is a specific group of individuals with whom you want to share your brand or mission statement. Individuals who make up your target market will share similar characteristics, such as geography, demographics or income levels.

Target markets are an essential part of your marketing efforts, and it’s important that you take the time to identify your target market in the starting phase. After all, you wouldn’t want to waste resources sending out materials to random individuals who likely won’t respond.

Defining Your Target Market

You might be wondering where to start, especially if this is your first time and you don’t have any historical information or data to pull from. You will first need to determine the key attributes of individuals in your target audience who might benefit from using your product or service. Here are six tips you can use to help you define your direct mail target market:

1. Examine your product or service

It helps to start by creating a list of features for the product or service you want to market. Then, next to each feature make another list of its benefits. Once you identify your benefits, make a list of individuals who need what your benefit achieves. Your company should also have an established mission goal backing everything it does. Take a look at other companies that have similar goals. Take a look at who they are targeting and who their current clients are. You can choose to directly compete for their audience which makes sense in some cases, or you might need to search for a niche market they might be overlooking.

2. Identify similarities in your current customers

Take a look at your current customer list and people who have purchased your product or service in the past. Notice who your best customers are and see what types of information you can scrounge up from this group of individuals. This is a great place to start, but keep in mind that your prospective customers might not look anything like those who have bought from you in the past. Take into account things like age, location, gender, income level, education level, marital or family status, occupation or ethnic background.

3. Geo-mapping data

Geo-mapping tools help you target individuals based on their location. Geo-mapping tools are able to find your target market using their postal code, city or province. There are several different methods of filtering data related to characteristics that you think are the best for your direct mail target market.

4. Using psychographics

Psychographics is yet another way you can pinpoint your target market. This category includes more personal characteristics of an individual, such as their personality, attitudes, interests or hobbies, lifestyles or behaviour. Think about how your organization will fit into your target audience’s lifestyle. Ask yourself how, where, when and why your target audience will interact with your organization and mission.

5. Review your decision

You shouldn’t break down your target market too far as you can have more than one niche market. But keep in mind that you will need to think about whether or not your marketing message needs to be different for each niche group. If you are choosing to communicate to many different niche groups with the same message, the targeting can be too generalized for their needs. This will also be the case if your targeting ends up with too few people fitting into the criteria you set for an effective ROI, as volume is important when sending out direct mail. You must find the perfect balance!

6. Look for other resources

There are some business and consumer classification datasets that are public data and free to use or will be relatively low-cost to access. There are existing lists that are searchable, rentable and can help your brand reach your target audience. Since you already understand many different identifying characteristics of your target customers, you can use this to search other mailing list managers, brokers or compilers.

List brokers help you find the right list based on your needs. If you feel like you have a good understanding of the target list you need, then a list manager would be the best option for you. List managers or compilers will help oversee specific mailing lists and keep them updated. It will be important for you to find a list manager who has a list that caters to your needs and industry. This can take a bit of time and research, or you can get help from a list broker.

Choose Troi Mailing For Your Direct Mail Marketing

Determining the right target audience for your direct mail efforts will have a huge impact on how successful your campaign is and how visible your products are to the audiences who need them. It’s a good thing that it’s relatively easy to find the resources necessary to help you find and reach your target audiences.

If you’re looking for a lettershop that provides both printing and mailing services for your direct mail marketing needs, please call Troi Mailing Services in Canada (Toronto, Ontario) at 1-866-486-9350 or contact us here.