Know Your Mailing Audience

3 MIN READ
Level: basic
Know your mailing audience

When creating a direct mail piece with our online printing services, it’s important to consider your mailing audience. Whether you design a direct mail postcard, booklet, self-mailer or newsletter, people are much more likely to respond to a mail piece if it applies to them.

Plus, narrowing down who you’d like to target can help you save money on your direct mail campaign.

Mailing Audience Demographics to Consider

  • Age range
  • Income level
  • Homes with children (or children of a specific age range)
  • Address type (single-family or multi-family)
  • Gender
  • Homeowner vs. renter

Capitalize on other information at your disposal:

  • Draw from your own customer data
  • Purchase a list through your Smartpress sales representative to reach new potential customers

Verify Your Mailing Audience List

Once you have narrowed down who you want to mail to and sent us a list to process, we can:

  • Check for duplicate records to ensure every person gets only one
  • Remove duplicates per household to ensure each household gets only one or each person in the household gets one
Target audiences with direct mail

Target by Location or Addressee

When preparing your direct mailer for online printing, it’s important to target your audience in a way that makes the most sense. Here are a couple examples:

  1. A company that services pools might target locations because they want to reach only nearby homes that have pools. We would use a phrase like “Or Current Resident” to show the mail is meant for the current occupant.
  2. If you are trying to reach specific people, we would run the list against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database to determine their most current address and ensure each mail piece gets to the right person.

Other Ways to Target a Mailing Audience

Businesses and industries use online printers like Smarptress to narrow down their target audiences in different ways. For example:

  • Salons – Target women of a certain age range
  • Barbershops – Can target men only
  • Real Estate – Agents target the closest given number of homes to a newly-listed or newly-sold home
  • Restaurants – Mail to the closest 5,000 homes around their location with an occupant list/saturation mailing
  • Dentists/Orthodontists – Target the nearest 5,000 homes with children age 5-17
  • Churches – Target all addresses within a five-mile radius with an occupant/resident list
    Pet stores or Veterinarian offices can target homes with dogs or pets.
Direct mail targeted by demographics

National Change of Address (NCOA)

When we direct mail or you, we run your list through the National Change of Address database. When we run NCOA, we need to know if you want to keep the move updates in the list or remove them.

For example, if you’re a dentist and we’re mailing a monthly newsletter for you, you most likely won’t want to mail to someone who’s moved out of state or outside of the geographic area you’ve selected. We’ll remove those from your list.

Note: When purchasing a mailing from us, we request you include a direct mail product in your order.