Page 213 - Duct Tape Marketing

197Chapter 13: Mailing Direct to Your Market

Magazine subscriber lists
Many magazines make their subscriber lists available for rent by businesses
with approved product offers. Contact an ad representative at the leading
publication that serves your industry or market area to learn about list avail-
ability, prices, and terms. Ask whether the magazine breaks its subscriber list
into specific interest or geographic segments. You may learn that you can
rent a portion of the list to reach only those subscribers who are most likely
to be in the market for your product.

Say you’re marketing a great new travel bag and you’d like to acquire a list of
people who would be apt to buy it from you. You start by contacting a major
travel magazine to inquire about buying access to its subscriber list. Because
you know that your bag won’t appeal to all subscribers, you ask about the
ways the list can be segmented. If you want to target your mailer geographi-
cally, you’d ask about obtaining names only for subscribers in, say, the
Midwest. Or maybe you want to send your mailer only to subscribers who list
home addresses. (This eliminates the names of travel agents and others who
receive the magazine in their offices.) Chances are good that the magazine ad
representative will tell you that the publisher can indeed segment its list geo-
graphically and by home versus office addresses. Furthermore, it may be able
to segment by subscriber income level — even by the type of travel the
person prefers. You’re on your way to a list tailored to your prospect profile!

The SRDS Direct Marketing List Source
This guide, published by the Standard Rate and Data Service, is available on
the reference shelves of public libraries. It features data on thousands of
mailing lists in hundreds of categories.

An hour or so browsing the catalog will help you focus on the kinds of lists
available — useful information to know before you enter discussions about
list rentals with magazine publishers or mailing service professionals.

The SRDS Lifestyle Market Analyst
Also available at public libraries, the Lifestyle Market Analyst provides con-
sumer profiles for the following categories:

ߜ Cities: Target your geographic market areas and then use the available
data to confirm (or redirect) your plans.

If you looked up the profile for our hometown of Bend, Oregon, in the
Lifestyle Market Analyst, you’d find that the average resident skis nearly
three times more often than the average American. (You’d know this
because you’d see an index number of 282 alongside the word Skiing,
which means Bend residents ski 282 percent the rate of average
Americans.) They also outperform national averages when it comes to
using recreational vehicles, camping and hiking, horseback riding, hunt-
ing, fishing, bicycling, and real estate investing.