Psychographic Targeting and Geo-Targeting

You can use other forms of targeting to narrow your audience on a mailing or contact list. You can use psychographic targeting to target customers according to their interests and buying behavior. For example, if you are marketing vacation packages, you might rent a subscribers list from a travel magazine. The demographics of the subscribers may be varied (they may be young or old, male or female, etc.), but the psychographic (they like to travel) is the same.

You can also use geo-targeting to narrow your audience by city, state, or zip code. Using zip codes, you can target it according to neighborhoods or postal carrier routes. For example, say you own a regional chain of nail salons that operates 200 stores across several states. You’re planning an e-mail campaign to send out discount coupons specific to each local nail salon. You might rent a list of prospects from a national beauty magazine. For each local nail salon in your chain, you can establish a five-mile radius based on zip codes. You can then send out e-mail coupons to people on the list who live within the zip code radius for each local nail salon.

You can use geo-targeting in cold calling as well, especially if you want to break into a certain local market for your product or service. For example, say you want to target business owners in the Seattle metropolitan area. In addition to other demographics for the type of business you are targeting, you might ask the list owner to limit names and phone numbers on your contact list to businesses with area codes that operate within a 100-mile radius of Seattle (e.g., 206, 425, 253, 360).

Try to select as many different filters as you can for a mailing list or contact list. For example, if you are marketing a small business product, you might select one city (e.g., Los Angeles), one group of potential customers (e.g., CEOs and company founders), and one company size (e.g., companies with 500 employees or less). You should have these filters ready when you contact the list owners to buy or rent e-mail lists. The more targeted you are, the better response you will get, and the more cost-effective your campaign will be.