One of the reasons direct mail marketing campaigns are so successful is because they are targeted carefully to reach the most relevant audience. Effective targeting not only brings in more qualified leads which turn into sales, but also optimizes your marketing spend. With DBM direct mail campaigns you can target granularly, well beyond the zip code level, to get your message in front of the right people and increase the success of your entire marketing campaign.

What is Targeting, Exactly?

When you think direct mail, it’s easy to imagine random flyers being distributed indiscriminately to every mailbox in a given area. But this couldn’t be further from reality. You wouldn’t pay to show an online ad for a local women’s boutique to a random group of people out of state – you’d use demographics to target the ad by gender, interest, and proximity to the store. The same applies to direct mail.

With campaigns run by DBM the audience is not only curated, but tailored specifically to your business’s individual needs.  Direct mail allows you to reach a very specific audience – just like you do with online with advertising. With diverse metrics and the ability to target by a combination of these metrics, the possibilities for audience refinement are endless.

What Metrics Can I Use To Target?

DBM can filter your audience based on a wide variety of metrics, with additional capability to layer these metrics. We can build a list for any location in the United States, helping you reach your potential customers – wherever and whomever – they may be.

• Zip Code: Target within a specific geographic region, based upon zip code.
• Community: Target sub-groupings within zip codes, such as specific housing developments, apartment complexes, or neighborhoods.
• Household: Target based on household composition, including number of family members and number of children.
• Home Value: Target based on Current Market Value.
• Length of Residency (LOR): Target based on how long they have lived in their home.
• Income: Target based on income bracket of the household.
• Gender: Target based on gender of recipient.

Or, combine any of these metrics to narrow your list down to a very specific persona.

Let’s look at an example to see how targeting on a variety of metrics works. Say you’re trying to advertise a new day care service. While targeting on a single metric – for example the zip code the daycare is located in – would certainly bring in some clients, you would achieve much more effective results by targeting on a combination of metrics.

• Residents within zip code of daycare center (zip code)
• Households with at least one child under the age of 5 (household)
• Households with a length of residency of less than a year (LOR)
• Households with income of at least $50,000 (income)
• Primary recipient listed as the mother in household (gender)

Now, your filtered list will contain people close enough to the daycare that it’s convenient, who recently moved to the area and likely do not yet have childcare services, who have a child of the correct age for daycare, and who make enough money to afford the cost. Plus, the mail will be addressed to the household’s primary decision maker for childcare services.

As you can see, this list is much more targeted and effective than a simple zip code level list.

How Do You Find the Target Audience?

At DBM we’ve been building lists for 27 years, so we have a lot of data and demographics knowledge under our belts. You can think of our database as a giant, instantly-filterable and constantly-updated list that allows you to select a very specific audience for your direct mail campaign, compiled by the following data:

• Data collected by the US government (for example census data).
• Public records.
• Consumer response data.
• Data from partners we work with.
• Research from past campaigns.

We then use our proprietary algorithms to filter our database based upon the criteria you select, creating your list. What filters we use and how specific we get is up to you, so every list is custom tailored to your particular audience.

Learn more about how our lists work: View our testimonials 

Ready To Give It a Shot?

As you can see, targeting is applicable outside the digital realm and targeted direct mail can serve as a powerful component of any multi-channel marketing plan. Ready to add direct mail to your campaign? Contact DBM to learn more about targeting and get started today.