Direct mail is one of the most effective ways to connect with your potential customers. The fundamentals of success will never be complete unless you have an accurate mailing list in your days. Gone are the days when the marketers used to send the advertisements and deals to every door step. For a booming campaign, you need to restrict and narrow down your potential customers, which can be done by making use of a targeted mailing list. However, sometimes, you will also have to merge different mailing lists to create a segmented mailing list that makes more sense for the current direct mail marketing activities. The impactful campaigns are those that are sent to the right audience. Therefore, consider these things before you send out the direct mail to the leads.

1.      MAKE THE MOST OF THE CONSUMER DATA

The customer data that is stored in the spreadsheet mailing lists is of the greatest essence. There are certain ways through which you can add filters to create new lists that merge the clients from different direct mail lists. You can focus on the age group, gender, past purchasing history, localities while making the selection.

2.      MERGING LISTS FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES

The mailing lists that you are using to create a segmented list of your own may have been prepared on different platforms. For instance, you may have been using a specialty mailing list obtained from a mailing list company that is prepared on excel. On the other hand, a certain behavioral interest mailing list that you got from a mailing list broker has been made on Microsoft Office Access. You may consider using Microsoft Publisher in this situation. It is a tool that will allow you to combine the lists from different sources. The Publisher also prompts the user about the mismatching fields. One of the commercial consumers mailing list may be missing the address field whilst the other postal mailing list that you are merging it with has the location field. So, basically you can resolve errors while you are merging the list when using Publisher.

3.      CREATE A BACKUP OF THE EXISTING MAILING LISTS

You will need the actual mailing list for some other campaign, which is why you must have a back up of the original list. This is because of the fact that the software you are using to combine the mail list may have irreversible steps. You will not be able to revert to the previous mailing list if you make an error. Therefore, it is recommended that you keep a backup of the various mailing lists.

4.      FOLLOW THE STEPS FOR MERGING MAILING LISTS

There are different software through which you can combine the mailing list. Even though it may appear like a daunting task to merge the mailing lists. You will simply have to follow the steps carefully, which vary from one platform to another. Just make sure that the fields match with each other and be careful of the formats if your list contains dates, postal code, and income details of the customers.