Marketing Tip of the Week: Mailing Lists

Now is the time to network!
It's hard in the winter for those of us in cold parts of the country: no one is thinking of water features with snow on the ground! So January and February are great months for AquaReale to go network and go do things we wouldn't have time for during the rest of the year. We have two goals this winter: to visit three garden centers, and meet and have coffee with two landscape designers each month for January and February.

Where to start?
For us, I needed to find the right places to reach out to, both for landscape designers and contractors and for garden centers. I did this in two ways.

1) Members of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (ALPD)
I first searched for local landscape designers via the ALPD website. I searched for my local chapter and looked at the current members. You can find all their information there. I then decided which people to target and try to meet.

2) Purchase Mailing Lists Via infoUsa
The second way was to purchase mailing lists for both landscape contractors/designers and for local garden centers. I purchased the lists from infousa. I find them very easy to use and very reasonable. Usually my lists are between 50-150 names and run on average $99 each.

I put in very specific parameters for each list.You can put locations by city, zip code, town, county, etc. I chose three specific counties we work with. For the garden center list, I requested companies that had more than 4 employees, and made between $500,000 and $5,000,000 a year in sales. You can play with the parameters to see what works best for you. Just remember to update your count often to give you an up to date tally of names.

I have called their help desk quite a few times and they always are able to help quickly.

I talked last time about how to approach garden centers. Tune in NEXT week to learn how to approach the landscape designers...

Questions? Call me at 215.805.8257 or email me if you need assistance.

To see how Pondtent can help you, visit www.mypondtent.com