Unverified lists
The unverified list is made up of people who do not reply to you, no matter what. What you have to decide is how far it is worth chasing these people.
Let us assume that you have got to the point where you know that solicitors' firms with under 5 staff are your prime target. There are 15,000 such but you have only got 1000 on your verified mailing list, leaving you with 14,000 on your unverified list.
What you have to do is try different things to bring these people into the fold. This can involve different approaches to your text and design and different offers.
How often you want to mail these people is a difficult judgment to make - you might decide once a year, or maybe once every three months - but you need to make sure that each time you mail them you get enough replies to add to the verified list to make it all worth while.
You also need to make sure that you are not entering the stage where you make such terrific offers to the recipient that they respond just for the free offer, even though they will never buy from you subsequently.
Other factors to remember are...
Firms can suddenly change their position because of a change in personnel - therefore it is worth staying with a company even though they have ignored you for years.
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Make sure that you always have your reply address on your envelope so that if they want to come off your list they can contact you easily, and you can remove them - thus saving you money.
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There are at least five different approaches to direct mail that are successful - but they are not all successful with everyone. With some people your approach might just be the wrong one for those people. If you would like to read about the five methods go to the Better direct mail copywriting website and click on the link to 5 ways.
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Finally, you cannot sit on an unverified list forever. An unverified list will go stale - new names must be added and companies that have shut up shop or people who have moved must be removed. To do this you must keep reworking the list - buying in new addresses, making sure anyone who replies is now coded "verified", and removing the hopeless cases. To read more on this continue below.
Expanding the unverified list
Expanding your unverified list is sometimes a problem, technically. If you are buying the list in from outside you need to find a way of ensuring that you can code out your existing clients by merging the fields across the databases. If you are not au fait with this approach it is worth talking to a company that specialises in this work.
Certainly it is going to be a waste of time if you keep buying in new lists which include companies you have already put on your verified list, or companies that you know are no good to you. All the savings you are making will now be lost.
However such merging is possible and is normally not at all expensive, since the people wanting to sell you the list will often be anxious to help you in this task if it ensures another sale.
Alternatives
Mention has already been made of the Better direct mail copywriting website - the ever changing list of ideas relating to ways of developing response rates.
Apart from topping up your unverified list with new names you really do need to be exploring different ways of reaching out to these people who refuse to reply to you.
Remember, one reason for their failure to respond is quite possibly that they are very happy with their existing suppliers. So what you have to do is make sure that your approach either offers something that your rivals do not offer, or you advertise this in a different way.
When you find yourself pondering what to do next you can do worse than take a look through some of the direct mail sites on the Mail Information Exchange.
This concludes the discussion of the Unverified list - to look at what happens to the Verified list click below.
 to verified list
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