How Good Is Your Mailing List? Part 1

We strongly believe in the power of direct mail marketing as a way to build business. Keeping your company or organization’s name in front of customers helps to reinforce their decision to use your products and services; for prospects, it creates name recognition; and for both groups it builds top of mind awareness for your brand.


The success of any direct mail marketing campaign is determined by three factors: the quality of the mail piece itself; the offer; and the mailing list. Of these, the mailing list is significantly more important than the other two. In fact, the Direct Marketing Association attributes 60% of the success of a mailing to the list itself and just 20% each to the mailer and the offer.

The secret to an effective mailing list
The secret to an effective mailing list can be stated in one word: accurate. Accuracy starts with getting the right individuals or businesses on the list – those who have an established interest in your product or service, or those who share the same demographic characteristics. Gender, age, income, level of education and geographic proximity are all examples of shared demographic characteristics.

Another measure of accuracy is the quality of each address. The individual or business name must be complete and correctly spelled; the street address must contain all necessary elements, including secondary information (i.e., unit, apartment, space, etc.) and street suffix (i.e., street, avenue, boulevard, road, drive, way, lane, etc.); and the city and state must have the correct ZIP or postal code.

An effective list has a data field for every unique element in the mailing list, even if it occurs rarely. List managers develop data entry conventions such as using standard abbreviations for street type (St., Ave., Blvd., etc.) and secondary address elements (Ste., #, Sp., etc.), and enforce the standards by not allowing creative data entry (such as entering a company name in the place reserved for the name of a person).

Mail list structure
Maintaining data quality is a function of how the mail list is structured and how fully data entry standards are developed and enforced. It is particularly important that the list have the right number of fields to contain all the name and address information, and to size the fields so there is enough room to hold the information without extensive use of abbreviations or truncating.

The first step in structuring a mail list is to determine the total number of unique data elements and to create a separate field for each one, no matter how infrequently it occurs. For example, if your mailing list contains just one foreign address, you will need to create a country field as well as any additional fields required by the country’s postal system (i.e., addresses in Puerto Rico require an urbanization code). If you want to include a middle initial for an individual’s name, you will need a middle name field and refrain from entering the middle initial into the fields reserved for first name or last name. Similarly, a list that contains both individual and business names will need a company field so that the business name isn’t entered into a field used for the individual’s name.

People’s names consist of five basic parts: prefix (Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., Rev., Sen., etc.); first name; middle name or initial; last name; and suffix (Jr., III, DDS, Ph.D., etc.)

The importance of maintaining separate fields for name elements in a mail list becomes clear when searching for duplicates in the list. If an individual’s name is separated into its constituent parts in a mailing list, it is much simpler to identify duplicates than if the first name and last name are in the same field.