3 Tips to Maximize Leftover Marketing Budgets

Time is ticking on the year’s marketing budget. What are you planning on using it for? If you don’t have a plan, don’t fret just yet – plenty of marketing minds are flooding with the mantra “Use it or Lose it” this time of year. But remember, those unspent dollars are extremely unlikely to return to the budget next year. So, what are you to do?

 

To avoid being shortchanged next year, marketers often succumb to frenzied, irrational and impulsive marketing purchases. Sound familiar? That hastily prepared ad campaign that garnered super low return? We’ve all dumped dollars.

 

Instead of dumping dollars down the drain this year, we’ve compiled three tips to make the year-end spend last. Kick the new year off right by setting yourself up for success – even if the clock is ticking down.

 

1. New Year – New Leads

Nothing’s better than a fresh list of strong, targeted leads. What better way to start the new year than with brand new prospects? Melissa Direct is your one stop shop for targeted mailing lists and sales leads. We carry hundreds of specialty lists that can be customized and tailored to your specific audience. Target by location, home owner/renter, household age and hundreds more selects! Plus, append more information before you order – like phone numbers, household income and more for ultra-personalized, customer-centric marketing campaigns that are sure to dazzle your audience.

 

Browse our most popular lists:

• Consumer Mailing Lists & Sales Leads
• Business Mailing Lists & Sales Leads
• Saturation/Occupant Mailing Lists
• Property Owners/Absentee Owners Mailing Lists
• And many more specialty lists and leads!

 

2. Year-End Cleansing

January first is nearly synonymous with cleansing. Whether your diet, screen time or other vices, a cleanse means a fresh start. It’s always a fantastic idea to use marketing dollars for a rejuvenating data cleanse and what better time than during the most over-indulging time of the year?

 

As marketers, our databases get flooded with murky data throughout the year. It accrues so quickly that it can snowball into a plummeting ROI, low customer retention and crash-landing marketing campaigns that lack any trace of personalization.

 

It’s the most wonderful time of the year to update customer data, qualify for maximum postal discounts, personalize holiday and new year campaigns by enriching customer data, and save massive amounts of money by cutting the waste associated with undeliverable, returned or multiple mailings to the same house.

 

3. A Nest Egg for Next Year

Our last tip (and perhaps least exciting yet extremely practical) is to bank on future needs. Your future data will thank you – I promise. With Melissa credits, there’s no expiration date on your budget. You can purchase credits now and you save them, use them, hoard them like Smaug or whatever you’d like! Bank on a future cleansing or list by buying now and using it later – so no penny of your leftover marketing budget is spent in haste (nor wasted).

 

Bottom Line

No matter how you use it, you better not lose it – but we advise to use it wisely. We are so confident in our top three tips that we are offering a special year-end promo just for taking our advice. For a limited time, receive 20% off your order of leads, a database cleanse or credits with code USE20. Check it out here!