Occupant Lists

An occupant list is a general list. It has no names and very few ways to be defined. The basis of an occupant list is the carrier route. When you order an occupant list you must select a whole carrier route which is roughly 350 records on average. You can however break it up by type of record - apartments, homes, businesses, PO boxes - and then also by average income of that particular route.

An occupant list is the least expensive list you can purchase and is the natural choice when you are only concerned about getting your mail piece delivered regardless of who lives at an address AND you want all the addresses in an area. In addition to selecting by geographical criteria (route, zip code, city, state, etc.) you can also select by a radius around an address.

Occupant lists can only be purchased for one time use.  When doing a walk sequence mailing it must have been put in the correct walk sequence by the USPS or a certified source within 90 days of the mailing.  If not done within 90 days of the mailing, technically you are disqualified from using walk sequence saturation rates. For example, if you have a list purchased on June 16th and the main database was certified on June 15th, then that list would be out of date and unusable by September 15th.

For a basic carrier route mailing (there are three levels - basic, high density, walk sequence), any mail shop with USPS approved CASS software will be able to code the list - no special source is needed.

Finally, you may address an occupant list just about any way you want - Neighbor, Our Friends At, Pizza Lover, Home Owner … any number of ways. The most common addressing is Current Resident but you do have flexibility.

Consumer Lists

A consumer list is just that - a list of consumers. You have almost unlimited ways of selecting this type of list. There is a good selection of criteria (selects) that are included in the base price of our consumer lists. Some of these are income, home value, age, length of residence, presence of children and martial status. For additional charges you can also make selections such as mortgage type, occupation, net worth, ethnicity, religion, email users, credit card user, mail order donor … it is almost endless. Whatever you have in mind, let us know and we will do the research. Consumer lists always come with names.

Business Lists

Business lists are best selected by SIC codes. We are able to take your general or specific descriptions and find the SIC codes that best describe the category you want to select.

You may purchase a basic list based on geography or use any number of selects. Unlike a consumer list there are no included selections beyond the type of business you desire. The cost for each select varies and you may have options for a prepackaged list that includes some selects at a discount.

Beyond the basic type selection, you may choose by one or more titles or include all key contacts. You can also choose employee size and sales volume, headquarters or branch, minority owned, small business indicator and others.

Specialty Lists

Do you want to market to new movers to your area? Only want those that came from out of state? From a different city? How about new borrowers? Boat owners? Hunters? Families with new babies? Or families that are expecting a baby? What about type of car owned? We have very accurate car ownership files and can provide what we feel is the most accurate auto list around. Let us help you develop more business.

If you can think it, there is a good chance there is a list somewhere that will fit your needs.

Specialty lists often take more in-depth research so therefore it could take several days to get the needed information. You will want to plan ahead and define as best as possible any market you will want to target.

Compilers

The compiler is the original source of data and different compilers will use different methods for gathering data. You have exact information (exact age for example) and you have modeled data that can be created from complex models that may include a variety of inputs. There is also information from utility changes, census data, surveys, subscription lists, courthouse records and others. Also, it is important to know how often records are compiled. Are they compiled only once a year and updated throughout the year or are they recompiled more frequently? The more frequent the more accurate your data will be. Also, it is important for a compiler to run their data through the NCOA process several times a year for increased accuracy.

List Formats

When providing Kama Inc. with your internal data or other database, our preferred formats to work with are Excel, dBASE, text (.csv, .txt, .tab) or MS Access. It is rare that a program you will have will not export to one of these types. Even customized and industry specific programs will have an export function for data. It is important to make sure your data is consistent from record to record to avoid additional conversion charges to make them functional. Consistent simply means that each field in a database contains the same type of information in each record.

For example, the first six fields might be First Name, Last Name, Street Address, City, State and Zip Code. If some records have this layout and others have the name in only one field (Name, Address, City, State and Zip Code) then the street address will be in column 3 of some records and column 2 of others. To certify addresses our program needs to know where the street address and other elements are and will be unable to do that if the location changes throughout the database. While we can often make inconsistent record layouts work, it does incur additional charges.

We put our clients first and that means always being aware of steps to hold down the cost of any direct mail project.

SIC Codes

Standard Industrial Classification codes are generally a 4 digit number set by OSHA and can be further defined depending on the compiler. SIC codes are used for business classifications and are your starting point for selecting a business list.

Suppression

Do you have people or businesses you don't want to mail to? Do you want to suppress certain zip codes or people who have requested not to be mailed to?

We can maintain a suppression file for you that includes anyone that has requested not to receive mailers from you. We can also use two or more files and make comparisons with those files so that certain records are removed from the file you intend to use.

This often can be the case when you purchase a file based on the demographics of your internal database but you also want to remove anyone from that purchased file that is already a customer. An example could be that you are making a special offer to potential clients but you don't want to alienate current clients with a discount for something they already paid for.

Whatever the reason may be, let us know what you are trying to do with all your data and the desired result and allow us to provide a solution so you only mail to those you want to.

Go to Merge/Purge for related information (link to be update).