Using Your Customer Data to Find New Customers

Data mining has received a lot of attention lately. Are you wondering how you can you easily mine your customer list and use what you learn to win new customers - without paying for expensive marketing consultants?

In some industries, location is a critical factor consumers consider when choosing a product or service provider. Good examples are pizza shops, dry cleaners or photo developers – no one would travel 30 miles for a drycleaner, no matter how good they were, right?

People who live near each other often travel along the same “convenience corridors” or paths between home, work and other essential locations. You can capitalize on this fact by identifying where your existing great customers live and then targeting and winning their neighbors as new customers.

To do this, you will first need to see your customers on a map. Choose a map provider with a commitment to data currency. Ask them to take your customer list and from it create a map that shows how many are in each postal carrier route.

Looking at the map you can see which carrier routes have the highest density of your customers. You can now use bulk mail by carrier route to send to only those that are not yet customers a compelling offer, such as a free pizza or $10 off their next dry cleaning. It is important that this offer have enough potential value to entice your prospect to try something new.

Once you make a list of the carrier routes with the highest numbers of existing customers, you will need to order residential occupant (res occ) address lists for those carrier routes from a list provider. A resident occupant list is a list of addresses of all residents in a particular area, prepared by a commercial list provider. It comes pre-sorted and saturated by carrier route and guarantees the maximum postal discounts.

Next, compare the new res occ list with your customer list for the same region, deleting any existing customers’ addresses from the res occ list. By doing this you have created a clean list of your best customers’ neighbors. The perfect list to mail to!

Believe it or not this method of targeting is relatively inexpensive. When you mail to at least 125 addresses in a carrier route, the threshold volume for what the Post Office terms a “high-density mailing”, you qualify to receive postage discounts of up to 50% off. For the most current rates, you may want to work with a lettershop or list provider, or call you local post office.