Let’s chat about mailing lists
Have you ever bought a mailing list? Have you ever thought about where business mailing lists come from? It isn’t something many people think about until they either need one or have to get one. I have actually built mailing lists, on a small scale. What a job it was! One of the lists I built was for a local small business that wanted to do some targeted marketing. The woman really wanted to have the list cover the entire state, but in the end we settled on including three counties.
I built the list myself manually, obtaining the contacts from the internet and phone books. The business owner and I both knew that list wouldn’t be perfect. After all, I could only include people I could find in the list. My list was a creation of one person using limited resources in an extremely limited geographical area. I had no capabilities to create a list of the original area she wanted. The process took a long time, many days consisting of many man hours, but I was very proud of the finished results. In retrospect, I didn’t make money on the project. I’d undercharged and out in so many man hours that I ended up making less than minimum wage. Much less. She inquired about doing another larger scale project with me but I declined. I knew I was not able to deliver the results she wanted and needed and stay within the budget she had.
A couple of years have gone by now and I now know for sure there are more efficient and affordable ways to get a mailing list. Now a person can pick from different types of mailing lists - consumer and business. Within those are more highly specialized lists - mortgage, business specialty and consumer response. A business can now specify exactly who they want to reach and how broad or narrow of an area they would like the targets in.
Guaranteed Lists is a company that specializes specifically in mailing lists. That’s all they do so they know what they’re doing. They have a consumer database of more than 280 million. They also boast the largest business database currently available, containing over 13 million companies in the US and 57 million worldwide. They guarantee the accuracy of their information, which is updated quarterly and comes from credit bureaus, private databases, listing houses and data compilers. If you need a company with the marketing expertise to reach your target, Guaranteed should be on your list to check out.
