Finding Needles In a Haystack for Lead Generation Marketers

Generating new nationwide customers often feels like looking for needles in a haystack. And while many marketing campaigns can fall victim to this mindset – the truth of the matter is that blindly searching for leads is an inefficient and outdated strategy in the direct mail industry.

In some cases, a mass mailing COULD make sense. If a company had access to unlimited funds, they could comb through every household within a zip code to find ALL the prospects that reside there.

It is inefficient, costly, and often time-consuming; but still profitable if your customer’s lifetime value is high enough or your product is something with a universal appeal – like pizza. After all, who doesn’t like pizza?

For other, more niche businesses, these mail campaigns are typically unsustainable for long term growth. Since they deliver to many uninterested or unqualified households within a zip code, these campaigns burn through a marketing budget faster than they can generate sales.

If a business wants to stand out against competitors without the high costs, they need to consider a fine-tuned approach to their campaign strategy. 

And even for our hypothetical pizza place – the lifetime profitability of a few customers may not be enough to make up for having to dig through thousands of prospects to find them. 

Mass Campaigns with Direct Mail

In the late 2000’s, many businesses shifted their marketing strategies from print mail marketing to digital advertising. Digital marketing was seen as a new and highly specialized field, while print mail at the time was over-saturated and clumsy.

With low response rates, higher costs, and rampant competition, direct mail seemed to lack the capabilities that marketers needed to remain relevant to their customers. 

Nowadays direct mail campaigns favor a much more targeted campaign strategy in comparison to 2005 – when the digital revolution nearly killed the industry.

The development of data modeling, customer matching, and personalization gives direct mail a unique advantage over digital ads, as the latter has succumbed to the same oversaturation that plagued direct mail 15-20 years ago. 

Some print mail advertisers may still push for mass campaigns within a given zip code. But unless your business is highly location-specific and relevant to most people (again like pizza), your mail campaign strategy will likely need some restructuring for a sustainable ROI. 

Finding a Needle in a Haystack

Let’s turn back to the “needle in a haystack” analogy and see how it compares to common lead generation campaigns. 

Imagine needles of various shapes, sizes, and materials spread throughout hundreds of haystacks on a farm. Some needles are of more value than others, but you have no way of knowing the number and type within each haystack.

You are also not alone, as many other people are also searching through haystacks to find these needles.

How do you find the most needles by the end of the day?

OPTION A: SEARCH THE ENTIRE HAYSTACK

If you have a lot of time and patience, you may choose to search the entire haystack. Meticulously searching through a couple of haystacks would take the entire day, but in the end, you found a couple of needles ranging from low to high-quality materials. 

While you may have found SOME needles, this method cost you a lot of time, energy, and you miss out on the remaining haystacks within the farm. 

This is how blanket direct mail campaigns work. While you were searching through the entirety of one (or few) neighborhoods in a zip code, you ended up burning through most of your budget for a few leads.

This strategy is highly reliant on a company’s expendable resources since the more mailers sent out means more possible leads in the future. 

Depending on how much monetary value your company assigns each lead, your business may or may not break even with large, untargeted campaigns. 

Which is why most modern direct mail companies opt for a different strategy.  

Related: Dissecting the Relevancy of Online & Direct Mail Marketing

OPTION B: USING A METAL DETECTOR

What if you could study the characteristics of the needles before searching through the haystack? If you could deduce that some of the higher-quality needles were made of metal, you could use a metal detector to find them within the haystack.

This method of searching results in a lot of possible needles. But surprisingly, not every needle is made of high-quality materials. They may have shared metal characteristics, but many are of little value to you.

After all, aluminum and gold are both metals, but your metal detector may see them as equal value. 

This is how typical direct mail campaigns work. By looking at basic attributes of your existing customer base, such as age and income, you can create large prospect lists to target these households.

However, these characteristics are only surface level, and they don’t tell marketers the entire story. The result is massive campaigns sent to neighborhoods that share similar characteristics, but only a few quality leads. 

Just like how a metal detector will find a lot of metal needles regardless of quality, a large prospect list based off a few characteristics will likely yield a lot of poor prospects, wasting a lot of your marketing budget in the process. 

OPTION C: USE A MAGNET

Now imagine you did further research into the characteristics of the higher-quality needles. Perhaps you discover that these needles were made with a mix of magnetic materials such as copper, platinum, silver, or gold alloys. 

Using this research, you decided to use a magnet to search within several haystacks. As a result, you find only high-quality needles in even less time than before. And you don’t waste your budget on needles that appear to be good, but actually are not worth more than the hay that they are buried in.

By understanding the characteristics of these particular needles AND using a method that takes advantage of their magnetic properties, your search method produced the best outcome.

Similarly, if you cross-check your best customer’s characteristics with several data points, you can build a much more accurate customer persona to target. 

This is how the DK Solutions TargetList campaigns differ from the typical direct mail campaign.

We don’t focus on every neighborhood across the country that shares a few similar characteristics; instead, we rely on thousands of data points to specifically target by household, the people who walk, talk, and spend like your ideal customers. 

And by targeting only those ideal prospects, 100% of campaign responses come from a viable lead. This is how our company cuts out the clutter that typical direct mail campaigns fall victim to, and how we can surpass sales goals with less mail volume overall. 

Related: How We Build Our TargetLists