Our lists come with some additional demographics, provided by carrier route; such as Median Age, Median Income, Median Home Value and % of households with children. This may or may not be of benefit to you, but it can help you understand your customer base, who you are mailing to and where they are in their life; how beneficial your product or service might be to them. Keep in mind that full carrier routes are less expensive than mailing a portion of the route. Some companies ignore business in their mailings, but consider that you can increase your lunch traffic by mailing to businesses.

As you might suspect, the art and science of list selection is a much written-about subject. But there are certain guidelines that can point you in the right direction. Start, for example, by forming a mental image of your ideal customers the ones most likely to need your product or service, and remain loyal over the years. Consider their demographics age, income, geographic location. Consider their psychographics lifestyle characteristics such as favorite activities, hobbies, or affiliations. The best initial guide to choosing a list is your hard-won knowledge of what your particular customers are like, based on your own business experience. Try to purchase lists of people whose characteristics match your "ideal customer" most closely. With this as a start, go on to fine-tune your list sensibilities by testing.

Keep in mind, that when you mail a full carrier route, you get the best postage rates. For example, if your customer list shows that you have 25 households on one carrier route, and the entire carrier route is 100 households, why not fill in your list, to include all 100 – then you are hitting your customers AND prospecting at the same time.