I'll cover two types of lists here.

 

1.) General Mailing Lists

This is a list of general personal mailing addresses not based on any sales.  Just personal mailing addresses for a specific zipcode, city, state, etc.  You can also choose male, female, age group, income, or other basic information.   Salesgenie.com was the best site I found for these personal mailing addresses. You could send flyers, catalogs, etc. to these addresses.  This is great, and a must to try on at least a small scale, for local businesses, local restaurants, etc.  Results from these lists depend so much on your type of business and your surrounding competition that it's impossible to predict what they will be.  I never sent to any of these lists for my fashion jewelry business because they were too general.  If I owned a brick and mortar store or restaurant, the first thing I would do is get a list of all addresses within 3 miles of the business and send the people coupon flyers.  First bi-weekly then monthly to kick start some traffic. 

 

2.) Targeted Mailing Lists

These are lists sold by companies that are supposedly categorized buyers like jewelry buyers, car enthusiasts, clothing shoppers, book lovers, etc.  These lists are supposed to be compiled from sales records of people who actually bought these specific products over a specific time period.  Some lists, like those on nextmark.com, also combine complete company customer lists over a specific period of time.  Like the, "Fingerhut," customer list.

 

Well, here's the problem, and there almost always is one.  Most of these lists are out dated, poorly categorized or just complete bullshit.  I know a couple of the companies on the nextmark.com list and their customer numbers are way off.  They claim the people on the list have made a purchase in the last 3 months, and I know for a fact it's more like a year ago. 

 

I personally never tried this ad medium because I know my own personal list of customers "who I know really bought" yielded a minimum 5% response rate.  We had 120,000 customers in our mailing list.  One mailing of a catalog cost us $200,000.  That was at the top of the budget for us for this medium and we didn't need more names to send out to.

 

Also, common sense tells me this targeted list would yield worse results then my own "real" list.  A 2-3% response at best wasn't worth me taking a shot with it.  And that's "at best."  It could be 0%. 

 

Last but not least, some lists are so shady that it's a huge financial risk to mess with them.  The company selling the list doesn't care.  They're thinking $500 for 10,000 addresses isn't much money even if half of the addresses are crap.  But to send a catalog to them will cost you $15,000 to $20,000.  That IS a lot of money. 

 

But, I did work for a company that worked with a lot of these lists.  This company was an online sportsbook and when they first started working with these lists people were getting five catalogs each, so they got a better software that got rid of the duplicate addresses.  This company was big time, sending out a million catalogs at a time.  They'd get back a 0.05% response rate which comes out to 5,000 customers.  For my business, to spend $1.5 million on catalogs and to only get back on 5,000 sales, I would have gotten smashed since my average sale was only $40.  But each sale for this sportsbook was in a sense unlimited.  Sometimes one guy would lose $200,000 or more.  They probably averaged at least $5,000 in sales per year per customer.  So even though my business would have lost $1.3 million with this .05% response rate, this sportsbook made $25 million a year with this same response rate.  It worked great for them!