Any marketer worth his or her salt knows John Wanamaker’s famous advertising maxim “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Unfortunately, it’s a very real situation for many marketers. In 2009, the Fournaise Marketing Group reported that, in 2008, 60 percent of all advertising spending it tracked globally failed to deliver the results expected; therefore, the spending was wasted.

When you consider this, it is easy to understand why brands often have a challenging time of accurately reaching and engaging their intended audience. Too often, companies overspend on low-value customers and prospects, and underspend on high-value opportunities.

Today’s marketing leaders are tasked to deliver better results in tight economic times while consumers have their hands on the information throttle, controlling when they want to receive information, or if they want to tune you out. Considering which customers and prospects to reach out to should go beyond list size, permission, cadence, content and deliverability. It shouldn’t be a guessing game; instead, here is what you can do to be improve your chances to win:

1. Set the Right Measurements
Yelling louder and more often means customers tune you out faster. Marketing leaders seek the type of attribution across all addressable media that they can get through email. If your marketing team sends traditional, mass advertising, then expect to see traditional results.

Also, are your organization’s goals, numbers and forecast results realistic? Will they grow and align with the addition of quality, profitable customers and prospects who want to engage with your brand? Will your organization’s list efforts have a positive impact on your other performance metrics?

Don’t let big numbers dilute your desired results. Identify what you want allocated to which segments of your target audience, whether it’s those who read your content, call you up, click through, advocate on your behalf or make a purchase. This should influence the quality, not the quantity, of your list efforts.

2. Does List Size Matter?
Don’t mistake a big list for a good list. Fattening up a list that’s designed to be successful can obfuscate your success. Big numbers may also camouflage ineffectiveness. If big quantities are unavoidable, create a separate list for a mass, less-targeted approach.

3. Start with the Best
Lead with your best customers— those who buy, cross-buy, stay loyal, advocate and have lower service costs. This is your best segment with regard to driving response, harvest intent and profit.

This is usually a no-brainer in concept, but gets tricky in practice. Given that the top 30 percent of customers and prospects are typically five times more profitable than the entire customer base, a generic, mass approach may cost huge profits. Filter out the unintended and undesired, such as promiscuous buyers with little loyalty intent, or those in an underserved geography. As you create and target the segments, personas and models for your promotion, blend in the necessary insight to help personalize the offer. Separate good customers from unprofitable ones; identify prospects who haven’t bought before.

4. Welcome Lookalikes
Incorporate those who resemble your best customers via website visitors, subscribers, those who have logged a phone call and other touchpoints where they reached out to you. This is your likeliest next group of customers. Insight such as income levels, regions, family status and more will highlight similarities with your target audience, clarifying those who make the cut.

5. Should You Include Your Social Audience?
If you have a social media presence and can track those who engage with your brand, then the answer is “yes.” Today’s leading edge consumer who posts a question, comment or review will be tomorrow’s new mainstream. According to an article on TechCrunch in May 2011, social media users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.

You’ll want to please your influencers. So, if this is not possible for you today, put it on your roadmap for the next year. If you incorporate social, create a corporate social media policy that empowers certain employees to respond to and engage your social media customer/prospect segment. Social media campaign management is emerging as a great challenge for direct marketers. As a result, most brands don’t take advantage of the great opportunity of integrating social media dialogue.

6. Add Relevant Insight
Whether targeting your best customers, first-time buyers or less profitable, infrequent customers, your list-building efforts should blend in the additional insight and important information that complements and helps create a richer understanding of your target audience. Including relevant elements such as historical interactions and purchases, product propensities, media and channel preferences, demographics, and interests will help shape the right target audience, as well as help personalize the right message.

7. Personalize the Engagement
Content might be king in that it’s the single biggest element to fuel sharing or engagement across your base, but it’s also expensive. Seek to leverage content from different sources while keeping production in one application and workflow to maximize resources and minimize time. Creative teams will consider all of the personas, preference parameters and relevant insight when creating the offer. A personalized offer and/or creative can drive a fourfold improvement in conversion.

8. Prepare and Coordinate to Follow Up Quickly
Companies spend a lot of time, capital and intellectual resources to serve customers. So it makes sense to invest in the technology to take the next step in a logical and timely fashion. In addition to non-IT response mechanisms such as proactive telesales or call center reps, you should automate your marketing systems with the right insight, channel, content and preference data so your customer-marketing system can recalibrate based on what a consumer does or doesn’t do.

The goal is to be prepared in order to intelligently respond with the correct response that nurtures customer engagement. Your systems will sense when a particular customer is ready to buy and will deploy automated decision technology to optimize the outcome.

You needn’t do all of this overnight. Adopt an incremental approach that starts with identifying and reaching your target audience first. Blend the right insight that helps to personalize the message and build the customer marketing system that coordinates the right response. You’ll see higher rates of success with your campaigns.

By Tim Suther
Article Source: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/8-tips-selecting-right-prospect-marketing-lists/1