Documentation: Conquest Graphics Mailing List Acquisition

When it comes to finding the perfect mailing list to maximize the impact of your promotional mailer, it can be tricky to navigate the jargon-ridden landscape of mailing lists. There are all sorts of confusing sources of mailing lists like list managers, list brokers, and list compilers, not to mention it can get tricky distinguishing the pros and cons of choosing one of those sources over the other.

So many of the best mail list providers online leave little control over list parameters to the end user, and they often have pre-selected lists that are shared by other businesses that choose to use their mailing lists, too, so your recipients could all be receiving the same kinds of mailers from your fiercest competitors, and that could minimize the potential impact of your mailing campaigns.

Luckily, there is a new way to buy lists now available through Conquest Graphics that provides the easiest mail list purchasing experience on the web.

Using our mail list configurator, you can build lists of both business and consumer audiences based on a large set of parameters that help to ensure you get a mail list that is a perfect match for your next campaign so you can efficiently and cost-effectively reach your intended audiences.

Using our Mail List Tool to Configure Your List

Step 1. Start in the Right Place

To get started building your custom mailing list, you simply need to visit the page for our mailing list tool, available here.

Step 2. Choose Type of List

To start configuring your list, you can use the configurator on the right side of the screen. At first, all you have to tell it is whether you are trying to build a business list or a consumer list.

Step 3. Geographical Selection

Once you make a selection, your configurator will expand one more step, asking you whether you want to build your list by geographical area based on radius from a specific address or by ZIP code.

Step 3a. ZIP Code-Based Geographical Selection

If you choose to build your list by ZIP code, you may enter any 5-digit ZIP code to create a list of all the business or consumer addresses available within that ZIP code. If wish to include more than one ZIP code in your mailing list, you may easily do so by comma separating the 5-digit ZIP codes as seen in the image above. The ability to choose recipients from more than one ZIP code really allows you to target a region more strategically than the radius-based option. ZIP code targeted lists allow you to target the most populated areas in a region since ZIP codes tend to have varying business or residential densities that can serve as a distinctive factor in your list creation alone, and we’re not even onto the main parameters, yet!

ZIP code-based geographical selection is most efficient for building lists of audiences over a medium sized area.

Step 3b. Radius-Based Geographical Selection

If you choose to go with the radius-based geographical selection option, you simply need to enter an address in the area you’re targeting and then include the desired radius around that address you’d like for this mail list to target.

The above image shows the process of inputting an address before setting it to be used in list generation. Below, you can see what the configurator should look like once you’ve set the address. Once the address is set, you can edit it by clicking the “Edit” link to the right of the bottom of the address.

Radius-based geographical selection is most efficient for selecting audiences over a very large or very small geographic area. If you want to hit all your neighboring everyone within 25 miles and you end up using ZIP code geographic targeting, you may end up with a bunch of unnecessary contacts in your list that live further than 25 miles away since ZIP codes can be pretty sprawling in some regions. It’s also far faster to provide a radius-based geographical area than a ZIP code-based one, since it’s as simple as typing in a single address and providing a distance radius around it for building the list.

Depending on the scale of your mailing and the population density of your targeted region, you may be sending it to people within 10 miles to people within 100 miles or more. We’re proud to offer some of the best prices in mailing lists available online, so the skies the limit and we can produce a mail list and printed mailers for businesses of almost any scale.

Step 4. Selecting Your Mail List Parameters

The type of mailing list you choose to build changes the set of parameters you’ll be selecting in the next step, but the process of working toward the checkout step is fundamentally the same across both. In effect, you’ll be faced with choosing the qualifying details of the businesses or consumers you want to be in your list. These qualifying details can be as simple as whether or not the resident has children to more complicated things like annual sales volume ranges or company size. No matter whether you choose consumers or businesses for your list, each of these remaining sets of qualifiers are completely optional factors that serve to provide a more customized, targeted list.

Say, for example, that you’re making a list of businesses in Richmond, VA, and you wanted to exclude businesses that have a sales volume over $10M and that have more than 100 employees.

Starting with the sales volume parameter, we should select all the values that are under $10, which includes the first 5 ranges of sales volume amounts. Then, leaving everything else set to the defaults—which automatically select “all” the variables from each parameter—we’ll then select all the “Employee Size” ranges that are under 100.

This will serve to give us a list of businesses that meet those parameters within our predefined geological region (which we set via ZIP code since we want to target the businesses immediately around our headquarters), giving us a list with a final count of 524 addresses for sending our mailer.

The four main parameters we provide for building business lists on our configurator are:

• Sales Volume
• Number of Employees
• Location Type
• SIC Code (Industry)

Our customers are also able to add more complex parameters into their list parameters via a custom quote, which we explain how to crate below. These premium kinds of business parameters include things like:

• Business Detail
• Exact Employee Size
• Exact Sales Volume
• Franchise Indicator
• Women Owned Indicator
• Small Business Indicator
• Gender of Contact
• Owns / Rents Code
• Public / Private Indicator
• Square Footage
• Computer numbers

Selecting parameters for consumer lists is pretty much an identical process, only with more consumer-oriented list parameters that typically serve to divide up customer segments for many businesses since they all have an influence on the types of products the various households would be on the market for. This kind of data is what allows our mail list customers to customize their list beyond the ways that many pre-existing online mail list sellers would allow.

If we were building a consumer list that consisted of households that have an income between $40k and $200k annually and that have also been living at their address for 3-9 years, we select all the parameters for “Household income” between $40k and $200k.

Next, we’d change the “Years at address” parameter to contain only the years between 3 and 9.

What this does is limit the existing list of all consumers in a geographic region further to give us a more targeted list, just as the business list builder could do with various business parameters.

The main list of parameters that are available for consumer lists are:

• Household Income
• Owner/Renter
• Home Value
• Housing Type
• Years at Address
• Households with Children
• Marital Status
• Net Worth
• Age of Resident

There are also a set of premium consumer parameters we can use for building lists that you can request via custom quote using the process described below. These parameters go even further for breaking down consumer market segments and include things like:

• Home details (such as age or purchase date)
• Credit information, including credit score
• Presence of phone numbers
• Buying habits/activities
• Health
• Life stages (new parents, empty nesters, etc)
• Car/automobile information
• Age & Gender of Children
• Households with Seniors
• Year Built

Step 6. Indicate How Many Times You Intend to Use List

Once you’ve selected all the parameters, you’d like to use to build your consumer or business mailing list, you should choose whether you want the list to be a single use or multi-use list. Enabling this option allows you to use the list as many times as you’d like before it expires. Otherwise lists are single use only.

Once you set how many times you plan on using the list, you may give it a name to help you remember it once it’s in your cart. After reviewing your list parameters to make sure you have everything selected that you wanted to have selected, you can review the list terms and conditions and then click “Save List.”

Step 7. Checking Out or Configuring Printed Mail Product

Depending on whether you have a mailable item in your cart already or not, you will be directed to one of two pages. Assuming you already had the mailable product in your cart, you will be directed to the checkout page so you can begin finalizing your order and submitting artwork/submitting the request for your mailing list.

If you didn’t have any mailable items already in your cart, you’ll be directed to a page that lets you choose from a set of our most popular mailable items so you can begin configuring the details of your selected mailed piece and upload your artwork for those.

If you choose to configure a printed product, the product page you select will have most of the mailing section preconfigured using the details brought over from your saved mail list that you’ve configured using the process we went through above.

Your mailing quantity will be pre-selected, but you’ll still need to select your method of mailing (First Class Non-Presort, Standard Nonprofit, First Class Presort, etc.). You also don’t need to select “Dedupe” or “NCOA” to clean up your list since any lists ordered directly from us are already groomed to meet those standards upon ordering.

Once you have all your job details set, you may add the product to your cart so you can checkout and get your mailer on into production.

If you didn’t want to print anything with us and only wanted the mailing list, you should click the “Proceed to Checkout” button to checkout with just your mailing list.

Custom Quotes for Premium List Parameters

The process of ordering a list with premium parameters is just as easy, if not easier, than our regular mail list ordering process. Simply use our Mail List Custom Quote form to submit a request for a list with the specific parameters you’d like included in your mailing list

It’s as simple as that! Simply ask, and you shall receive. It’s also fine to submit your request by our standard custom quote form, as well.

Delivery of the Mailing List

Once you have completed checkout and arranged the payment for your mailing list, you’ll be able to download the list as a CSV from your account’s jobs list. You’ll also receive an email with a downloadable link that gives you access to your mail list.

Some of the best and most rewarding benefits to purchasing a mail list from Conquest Graphics is our unique ability to eliminate the need for finding a third party mail list provider. This puts the entire process of ordering the printed pieces and finding a mail list provider under one roof so you can count on consistent quality throughout the process of placing and executing your mailer.

Some of the other new perks brought about by choosing to purchase your mail list from the same online vendor include significantly faster turnarounds and a new ability to get printed mailed pieces out to your desired audiences in much shorter timeframes. All of this combines to create a one-stop direct mail ordering experience that is unlike any other online.

So what are you waiting for? Get started ordering mailing lists and printing directly to mail with Conquest Graphics today!