Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

In addition to local chamber of commerce listings, I would highly recommend leveraging your local business journal. Almost every single month our local business journal (LABJ, OCBJ or SDBJ) puts out a list of the top businesses in an industry and lists addresses and phone numbers along with revenue numbers.

Hope that helps,

Kimberly

First of all, make sure you know your target audience well.
After that you can either go to list brokers which you can find online, or through the DMA (Direct Marketing Association)
And if you intend to work with a specific audience that has an association contact that association to see if they sell that mailing list

Are you sure direct mail is the best way to go right now? If its a new business, they may not have figured out the most effective sale message.

Direct mail is not cheap. 200 dollars buys you about 6,000 names. Add to that the cost of printing postcards and postage and your at $4,100 in advertising expense in no time.

You might want to consider other less expensive means right now. Something like a Coffee magazine, newspaper inserts, small adds in newspapers and neighborhood magazines, anything that will get the message out in front of a lot of eyeballs at a very low cost. Once you have found a message that pulls folks in, then use that message on a direct mail campaign.

Of course, you may want to find a list broker and find a very targeted list, and just do small mailings.

It really comes down to knowing how much you can afford to invest and lose if it produces no results. Thus, my advice of start small until you find something that works, then scale up.

If you want to learn more about direct mail, here is a link to the USPS web site with very detailed information that will help you:

https://www.usps.com/directmail/createdirectmailonline.htm

Hope this helps you.

Darcy Moen
Customer Loyalty Network

It may be cheaper to have your local newspaper (perhaps the local free paper) produce an insert for you. You can tell the newspaper what areas you want to target. Having them print and distribute makes it easy for you, and can be a huge savings in cost.

As others have noted, direct mail may not be your most effective avenue. Consider your ideal demographic, and figure out how to reach them. The better you can identify WHO you want to sell to, the easier it is to make a message for them, and to reach them.