Building Your Company's First Prospect List
Quick! What’s your strongest marketing tool?
Your company’s website?
Your social media accounts?
Your perfectly-designed email template?
Wrong. The strongest asset in any small business marketing toolbox is a finely-tuned prospect list. Your prospect list represents the pulse of your target audience, with the ability to segment customers by interest, lifestyle, buying habits, product/service affinity and other metrics. It's your marketing lifeline. It's a driving force behind your direct mail marketing, mobile campaigns and social advertising. But before you can use that prospect list to drive awareness to your best customers, you need to build it.
Where do you start?
Building Your Internal List
You start by building your internal list, one based on information you already have access to.
It's common for your first prospect list to feature current and past customers. If your customers are purchasing from you online, you already have their address information. They submit it with their order. If they're not, address collection is something you will want to work into your sales process, whether that be through a loyalty program where they receive special deals or promotions, a contest you run, in-store events they attend, classes or other similar methods of collecting essential information. However you decide to do it, creating this process will help you build your prospect list organically over time.
Once you begin aggregating your list, it's not uncommon to find some of your information is incomplete. Maybe you're missing certain things like a customer's proper first name or the city in which he or she lives. MyAcxiomPartner offers List Enhancement Services to help you fill in the blanks or recover missing information. To fill in your gaps, simply upload your current list, select the information you're looking for and let MyAcxiomPartner go to work.
Of course, that's not all these list enhancement services can help you do. Through MyAcxiomPartner's List Enhancement Services, small businesses can build their own audience, overlaying data on more than 3,000 different demographic and psychographic categories. This helps SMBs gain more insights into whom their customers are and what they're most likely to do to target them with greater relevancy and personalization.
Purchasing or Renting Direct Marketing Lists
Some small business owners may also be interested in purchasing or renting direct marketing lists to help them reach new customers. For this purpose, MyAcxiomPartner serves as a one-stop shop for marketing, purchasing new leads directly from our easy-to-use, self-serve application. Small business owners have found great success with MyAcxiomPartner because it allows them to quickly find new leads and build campaigns all on their own! And, there is no subscription fee. You only pay for what you need.
Acxiom is an industry leader with more than 40 years of experience in direct marketing and data compilation, offering the widest variety of mailing lists and sales leads.
Some of our most popular lists include:
Consumer Lists
Reach households and individuals based on demographics, lifestyle interests and purchase behavior.
Business Lists
Reach businesses based on business type, number of employees, titles and other selection options.
New Homeowner Lists
Whether you're an insurance company or you specialize in custom furnishings, the New Homeowner lists can help you connect with an audience excited to receive mail at their new address. Homeowner lists are updated weekly from multiple sources to help you reach confirmed new homeowners in any area.
Real Property Lists
Benefit from the largest database of properties and property owners available, ideal for marketers of home equity, home refinance, and other home-related offers.
Saturation Lists
Through MyAcxiomPartner, small business owners can receive approximately 100 percent coverage of addresses within a geographic area, allowing you to saturate neighborhoods and reach the current occupant at each address. Acxiom offers targeting options, including by zip code, city, state and radius around an address or zip code, to ensure you are only targeting the most relevant people to avoid any wasted spend.
That red figure? Everyone in there is someone you want to reach.
Any one of the lists outlined above will help you to identify relevant new prospects and sales leads based on the filtering criteria you've selected. Once the target audience has been selected, such as women-owned businesses in Colorado with more than 1,000 employees, use the online-ordering system to select how many leads you are interested in and receive a quote. You have full control over scope and spend.
Putting Your List to Work
Once you have your list, what do you do with it?
Direct Mail
As a smart SMB, you're probably already very familiar with direct mail marketing. Direct mail provides a convenient way for SMBs to reach out to customers or prospective customers with information regarding special promotions, new products or other brand-related information. Whether you choose to send a catalog, a poster, an invitation to an event, a flyer or another print piece, small business owners have used direct mail marketing for centuries to stay top-of-mind and reach prospective customers. Utilizing a finely-tuned, up-to-date prospect list is essential for keeping up with direct mail best practices.
This is often where many businesses begin with direct marketing. However, savvy SMBs can use the same direct marketing list to power other efforts, as well.
Mobile Advertising
Q: What do you call a computer you carry 24/7 and look at, on average, 150x a day?
A: Your mobile phone.
Did you know the same direct marketing list you created for direct mail can be used to power your mobile advertising? Well, it can, allowing you to deliver your message to households and individuals based on demographics, lifestyle interests and purchasing behaviors, reaching them on the devices they carry and check all day long. Better yet, you can target customers on mobile for as low as two cents per ad view. How's that for cost-effective?
And it's easy-to-use! Simply define and target your audience on MyAcxiomPartner, select your campaign plan and then use the Mobile Ad Creator to build your own ad. Mobile ad campaigns may be broken out for quarterly campaigns, monthly campaigns or for a single event blast, making them not only flexible but also great for testing.
Social Advertising
What are so many of your customers doing while on their mobile phones? They're on Facebook — scrolling, liking and checking on their friends (and their favorite places). You want to reach them there, to, and now you can. Small business owners can use MyAcxiomPartner to target customers or prospects on Facebook with the same finely-tuned marketing list they've used to build a direct mail list or mobile campaign. You've spent the time to create the list – why not get the most use from it you can? That's what we call "small business savvy." Social advertising lets you put your brand where your customers are already searching for a low cost.
As a small business owner, your prospect list helps sustain your marketing and adhere to best practices. We understand how important it is to you. That's why MyAcxiomPartner allows you to use a single prospect list to launch a multichannel campaign comprising of direct mail, mobile and social advertising. This allows you to reach the same audience you're already targeting with direct mail multiple times for less money.
Need help building or fine-tuning your current prospect list? Get started with MyAcxiomPartner!