What can you do with a Saturation list?

Recently our team here at Tri Auto has been partnering with more and more ad agencies.  We offer a behind the scenes service providing all sorts of direct marketing - to make their lives easier and to share our expertise in automotive direct mail.  For many, saturation direct mail is something they don't have a lot of experience with and it helps to have a team behind them that has specialized in it for years.

That being said, I have had the same question twice in the past few days - "Don't you have to hit an entire zip code to use a saturation list?"

The short answer is-no.  In fact you can even target your mail within a zip code using actual demographic info.  So what's the deal?

• Each zip code is broken down into carrier routes.  It's just how it sounds, carriers = your mailman.  So imagine your mailman delivers to your neighborhood, the one down the road and two across the way.  That group of neighborhoods becomes a "carrier route."  It could be 50 homes or over 500, just depends on the market.
• To get the "saturation" discount you only have to hit whole carrier routes.  Some companies are set up better than others to handle this type of list selection.
• So what carrier routes do you choose?  This is where the demographics come in to play.  For each route we can show you the average home value, income and age for the area.  After a quick consultation with you on the market in question we can select the areas for you or you are welcome to do it yourself.

It's as easy as that.  So let's say there are 8,000 people in a zip code but you only want to do 5,000 mailers - no problem!  It is also easy to split those 5,000 mailers over three different zip codes as you like.

The main point of this post is to just let everyone know that saturation lists are becoming more and more effective and easy to use.  Katy Peat is the zip code diva on our team - she not only consults on what areas to mail to but can also share tips on avoiding certain pitfalls and using Marketvision data to help increase response on your future sales using the zip info from past ones.  If you have more questions feel free to email Katy today.

Bulk Mail vs. First Class

Future clients often ask me "do you use bulk mail?" My answer is..."sort of..." Here's the low down on bulk mail and how it can mean very different things to different industries and companies. The best way to describe is - yes we take advantage of bulk postage pricing, however we do what we can to control the delivery window. If you ask the post office they will tell you it takes 12-15 days for bulk mail to be delivered from the day you send it. If you ask me it takes 2-3 days on average from the day we deliver it. We go to great lengths to ensure this time frame and on average 90% of our mail hits within it. Check out some of the things we do and a few you can control to help your mail delivery here in my MailPlus post from this summer. So, to the real match up today-First Class vs. Bulk Mail. Which is it? It does depend on what and who you are mailing. As long as you are doing at least 3,000 pieces in a realistic area around your dealership I'm going to say Bulk Mail all the way. Why?

1. It's CHEAPER-much cheaper
2. It's trackable-after we drop First Class mail there is no finding it-it floats around in post office la la land until it reaches its destination.
3. I trust Bulk Mail through our MailPlus system to be more reliable than First Class.

"Bulk Mail" confusion

In the last 10 years mail delivery has changed drastically. I started at Tri-Auto in 2004. At that time we were one of the very few automotive mail providers in the country using bulk mail postage. Most of the 'big guys' were still using First Class because bulk was unreliable and required maximum effort to even figure out the system. Fast forward to 2009 and my guesstimate is 90% of anyone using saturation automotive mail is mailing in this way (you can obviously also use it for non saturation mail as well). Among this camp there are two ways of getting the mail into homes. They are most commonly referred to as "SCF Delivery" and "DDU Delivery." So just what do those acronyms mean!?

• SCF - Sectional Center Facility. Mail comes in to these large postal hubs and is the dispersed to the...
• DDU - Destination Delivery Unit. ...or your local post office. Postmen and Postwomen deliver the mail from this location.

The difference in the two types of delivery is where the mail is being dropped off. Companies choose which location they "drop" the mail to for different reasons. After numerous conversations with the Post Office we've found dropping at the SCF level to be the most reliable. We were just given stats that 85-90% of DDU's now no longer have the sorting equipment necessary for our type of mail, so if the mail is delivered to them they are just sending it back to the SCF to be sorted anyway. We figure we'll cut out the middle business and just send straight to the SCF where it can be sorted and sent out correctly the first time. On the flip side, I know there are many companies who deliver to the DDU-and all of our systems are different so they may have just discovered another work around. Hopefully this helped to clear up the difference in mail delivery-it's all "bulk" in the end but the additional follow up and attention to detail is what makes all the difference on whether or not your mail is in homes on time. Check here for more info on how we attempt to control our mail AND things YOU can do to ensure your mail is delivering as reliably as possible.