Customer Lists

Good Morning,
First quarter is usually the time of year that businesses want to build their customer base. I get calls and questions from businesses wanting to know about lists and costs. It seems the standard question is “I need a new customer list; how much will it cost?”
Before I can give a dollar amount I need some information, including what you want to accomplish. But first let me go over some types of lists and their effectiveness.
The best list is your inhouse current customer list. This list is your most responsive list, and if you kept it up to date, then there is no out-of-pocket expense. The next best is your past customer list. There might be some cost to bring it up to date.
The third type of list is referrals from your customer base. You should have a system set up to capture referrals. If you don’t, you’re missing out on a lot of business.
The next best list is a very little known kind of list. We take the top 10-15% of your best customers with as much information as you know about them and find others that match their demographic. The more information you have about them the better. This list starts at a base of $750-$1,000, plus the cost of the list.
This is followed by purchasing a response list. In most cases you can not purchase your competition’s customer list, but you may be be able to purchase or rent a list from a non-competing companion product. What product do your customers buy in conjunction with yours? Cost can vary from $70 to $200 per thousand names.
A plain demographic list is next and is the most common list purchased. As the name implies, these lists are based on demographics, such as zip code, home value, household income, presence of children or no children, age and more. For businesses you can again select zip code, SIC code, number of employees, sales volume and others. Cost depends on the number of names ordered and the information requested. If you’ve done your research on your selection, you can get a good response from these lists.
With all these lists, you can also get email addresses. With some, you get a copy of the address and with others the list owner will send out your email for you (at an additional charge) and you don’t get the list, only the people who respond to your email.
Each of these lists have a lot of subsets and they can also be merged and purged with one another.
If you would like to know more about customer lists, which is the best for you and how to use them effectively, just contact me. Till next time,