It’s said that your best prospects are your current customers. Indeed, it is typically much easier and more cost-effective to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers than it is to acquire a new customer. That’s partly because you don’t have to work so hard to convince your customers that you offer a great product or service – they already know that; that’s why they do business with you.

 

But another reason it’s easier to sell to existing customers is that you can be certain you’re marketing to people who are proven to be your target audience – those who buy your products and services. Imagine, then, how great it would be to keep that element of certainty and expand your prospect list far beyond your existing customer base. Now you can, with our new data analytics service, the Look-Alike Report.

 

The Look-Alike Report takes your current customer file and analyzes it to show you common characteristics of your existing customers. With this knowledge you can then generate more precisely targeted marketing messages and find better prospects. It works like this: you upload your customer list and those names and addresses are confidentially compared to proprietary third party data to identify common demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics of your existing customers. The Look-Alike Report shows you in summary, or in detail, who your customers are.

 

With that very detailed picture of your customers in hand, you can also order a mailing list of consumers from our InfoBase-X Consumer List that have the same characteristics (“look like”) as your current best clients. We create the lists and let you market to prospects who “look like” your existing customers.

 

What you need to know

• We’ll help you determine who your “best” customers are. It may be that not every customer of yours would make an ideal target prospect. So when we analyze your customer list, we calculate Market Penetration Index (MPI), which tells you what percentage you already have of total potential customers. Records with an MPI of 120 or higher are your best customers.

 

• Currently, the Look-Alike Report is only for consumer mailing lists (not lists of businesses).

 

• We’re happy to send you an example Look-Alike Report. Give one of our customer support experts a call at 866-665-2787 and we’ll answer any questions you have about the Look-Alike Report and send you a sample so you can see for yourself what a powerful tool this is.

 

Still not sure how the Look-Alike Report might work for your business? Here’s an example. A local retailer sells home décor and gift items, mostly priced in the mid- to high-end range. The owner, Becca, knows that most of her customers live nearby (she collects their addresses for her in-house list). She’s not sure, but she thinks that most are professional woman in the middle- to upper-middle income ranges.

 

Becca orders the Look-Alike Report and finds that her best customers (as measured by an MPI of 120 or higher) are working women aged 36-65 who have completed college or graduate school, are married, live in a single-family home, have estimated household income of $75,000 or more, have lived at their current address for at least four years, respond to marketing mail, and actively use credit cards. Based on that very detailed picture of her best customers, Becca orders a list of prospects with the same attributes – and achieves a direct mail ROI five times what she had seen without the Look-Alike Report.

 

You can achieve similar results. Get started with the Look-Alike Report from Mailing List Services today. If you need help, give us a call at 866-665-2787. We have customer support experts ready to help Mon-Fri, 9AM to 8PM Eastern Time.