Most educational publishers rely heavily on direct mail in order to promote and sell their products and services to educators. These promotions run the gamut of a full catalog of all the products in a company's product line to postcards announcing special offers or new information available on a company's web site.

With more than 4.4 million educators at 108,000 school buildings and 16,000 districts, no company can afford to cover this entire market with one or more mailings.

So, how do you sift through all the options in order to make the best list selection possible and increase your response rate?

Luckily, there are three companies that do a lot of the work for you: MDR, CMG, and QED. All of these companies have complete databases of the education market with a myriad of demographics attached to each school and district. They can tell you what grade levels are taught in each school, how many students are enrolled, how many computers are in the school, the ethnic percentage of the school population, the location (urban, suburban and rural) of the school and hundreds of other statistics about that school.

These companies also have a database of teachers and administrators and information about what they teach or their main job function. Some companies also offer lists of teachers who have purchased something from another company.

So, where do you start?

My recommendation is to start with your own customer database. By understanding your current market, you can easily expand into selling your prospect market. The key is to understand that your best prospects are those schools that mirror the characteristics of your current customers.

All three of these companies offer a service that profiles your customers against the entire education market. You send them a file, they merge/purge the file, and generate reports that will answer the following questions:

Are your customers mostly rural, suburban or rural?
Are they small, medium or large?
Are they rich, average or poor?
Are the connected to the Internet or not?
Are they public, private or Catholic?

Depending on your specific product line and the market limitations or requirements of your company, these reports can all be tailored to examine specific demographics.

The real advantage of this profile will be that your customer database will now be "tagged" and you can use this to select additional schools and districts to target by giving the list compiler specific instructions on how to select new names.

Once you understand the demographics of your customer base, it is time to determine your specific marketing strategies for selecting your mailing lists.

Strategy #1
Mail to your customer schools often and in-depth.

Think of your customer school as a gold mine of new business. Schools that have purchased only one product should be purchasing more. Schools that have purchased several products will be ready for offers that will motivate them to purchase entire product lines or site licenses. Your list selection should include additional teachers or administrators at these schools – over and above the names that you have captured in your customer database.

The direction to give the list company in this scenario would be:

Select all the elementary schools and districts in our customer database. Give me a list of all the grade 4 teachers, librarians, media directors, and principals at each school. Select all the districts associated with these schools and give me the names of the supervisors of library services, Elementary Curriculum, and Title I.

Strategy #2
Mail to all the schools within your customer districts.

Say you have sold a reading program to an elementary school in XYZ district. The best prospects for new business will be the other elementary schools in that district.

The direction to give the list company in this scenario would be:

Select all schools in my customer database. Identify all the districts associated with these schools. Give me a lost of all the schools in those districts and eliminate my customers.

Strategy #3
Mail to prospects that most closely resemble your customers.

The profile report of your customer list will contain many market penetration charts – depending upon the demographics you have chosen to analyze. The most common chart (and probably the most useful) will be a chart of your customers by enrollment. Enrollment has always been the key demographic characteristic of list selection because the money that is funneled into schools from the federal and state governments is generally divvied out by the number of students in a district. Generally, the larger the school, the more money they have to spend on your products and services.

Starting with the enrollment chart, you can quickly see what segments of the market you have the best penetration in.

The direction to give the list company in this scenario would be:

Select all the prospect schools in the segments where we have penetrated more than 50 % of the universe.

Using these three strategies in combination, will give you the best lists for your next mailing and should increase your response and revenues.

One final word.

Smart marketers know that tracking results is critical to future success since the idiom of marketing is "do more of what work and less of what doesn't". A simple strategy but one many companies can't follow because they don't track responses very well.

Even if you are not tracking specific lists, offers, mailings, etc., there is a simple way you can measure your success. Simply do a profile every year at the same time and track the differences from one report to another. See if you have increased your business from customers. Analyze whether you have increased your penetration in a specific segment. Take charge of your future and stop the strategy of mailing to the same list every year because that's what you've done for the last five years. Remember, selecting the right list is 60% of your success in direct mail marketing!