40% of your marketing campaign success depends on the quality of your targets list. So how do you make sure that you’ve got a quality asset ready to support your marketing campaign need?

To help, we’ve outlined 8 simple steps to Boost* the results of your next campaign.

1. Check their ID first
Have you ever planned a campaign for the IT Manager or network administrator and you get your list ready to send and all the titles are CEO’s, Presidents and the occasional CIO? At least the CIO is the right department, but your message, offer and package are all speaking to the IT Manager, versus the President and CEO that is in your list.

Action: Secure and review your data before you start into the campaign planning process. Your data should drive your message, offer and creative strategy.

2. Check the Age
With data, older does not mean wiser, more experienced, or of higher quality. Data decays at an average of 2% to 4% per month, so if your data is more than 12 months old is very likely that 24% is no longer valid. Contact name decay is the primary driver of inaccuracies; over 90% of errors are due to the contact having left the company. With the number of layoffs in today’s economy data decay is more prevalent.

Action: Maintain a date stamp on all your data and each time a record is changed update the date stamp with the change date. If the majority of your list is over 12 months old, consider performing a telephone contact validation effort before sending any mail.

3. Certify Data Accuracy
7 out of every 100 standard mail pieces are disposed of by the USPS. To avoid having your mail be disposed of make sure your agency or mail house is having your data CASS certified before mailing. If you’re one of those curious types, CASS stands for Coding and Accuracy Support System. The costs are minimal at less than $1 per thousand records processed and the turnaround time is usually less than 48 hours. As an added bonus the USPS will give you a discount on postage if you can provide them proof of CASS certification. If you need further justification, standardizing your data through CASS will also improve your likelihood of finding duplicates in your data (see tip #7).

Action: CASS your data or work with a partner that will include this as part of their services.

4. Check for Data Changes
3% of all mail sent is undeliverable and 40 million change of addresses (COA) are filed annually consisting of both business and contact addresses. With the fall of commercial real estate rates many businesses are moving or considering moving for more favorable rent structure. To make sure your communications are getting to the destination have your data sent through National Change of Address (NCOA) services prior to mailing. The costs are also minimal at less than $2 per thousand records processed and with a turnaround time less than 48 hours. Change of address is also available for email, which is referred to as Email Change of Address (ECOA). The costs are much higher and it is more applicable to consumer targeted marketing campaigns.

Action: NCOA or ECOA your data or work with a partner that will include this as part of their services.

5. Remove Non Targets
Remember the AOL CD packages? As a customer, we received an AOL CD sign up every quarter. AOL was excellent with follow up frequency, but could have saved themselves a fortune by removing existing customers from their mailings. The same applies for email.

Another bad habit we see is companies mailing to their competitors and employees. Unless you like sharing all your ideas with your competition so they can leverage or enjoy wasting money, remove competitors and employees from your mailings. Rather than wasting money by mailing to customers, competitors, and employees, donate to a charity like the Children’s Cancer Association.

Action:Maintain suppression files for customers, competitors, and employees. Remove the suppressions based on contact, address, company, phone, and email duplication.

6. Respect the Mail Room or Mail Server
Sending 100 mail pieces to the same address, with the same message and offer tells the receipt that you don’t care enough about their business to find out the right person. Rather, your betting on the law of large numbers—if you cast the net wide enough someone is likely to respond. When in actuality the opposite is true. Save some of your money and focus your marketing efforts. If you have excess money, donate to charity, they need it more than a mail room needs 70 versions of the same mail piece.

Companies like Intel have firewall settings that if too many emails are sent to the same domain within a short period of time, all emails from that sender are blocked.

Action: Group your list by company (and or address) and sort descending by company to identify where you are going to send multiple communications to the same location. From our experience, sending any more than 10 to the same mail room is likely to get your communication round filed (aka thrown in the garbage).

7. Remove duplicates
Yes, removing duplicates seems obvious. We wish we did not have to add this to the list, but it occurs too often—you get the same exact mailing more than once at the same time. The reason why this occurs is that many companies remove duplicates through exact matches only. For example, we often get the same mailing for Troy O’Bryan at Response Capture, Inc. and Troy O’Bryan at ResponseCatpure.com, LLC. By standardizing your data through CASS (tip #4), identifying duplicates will be much easier.

Action: Performing your duplication in layers by using exact matches first, then matching against a subset (left 7, 5, and 3 characters) of each field information until you’ve isolated a unique list of contacts.

8. Say No to Title Slugging
Sluggers in baseball are heroes (provided they avoid steroids), sell tickets for the franchise and get themselves large multi-year contracts and product endorsements. The exact opposite is true for “Sluggers” in direct marketing. Title slugging your list with first name “IT” and last name “Manager” is the fast path to your mailings demise—the round file (aka the garbage can). Like steroids, any short term success you experience “Slugging” will be tarnished by a series of bad press by vocal Fashion Designers or more importantly your boss.

Action: Don’t title slug. Save your career by spending a little extra effort to find the right contact for your marketing campaign. There are numerous options available such as social networks, data appends or contact gathering telemarketing that all have high results at finding the right contact.

If you have other tips or comments for how to build a high conversion target list, share your thoughts….

*Full Disclosure: ChannelBoost is a partner of ours that gets excellent results for their clients using direct mail. From time to time you may see some of our content promoted on their website.