Learn to target your business mailing lists By zip code

When creating a business mailing list campaign by zip code, from time to time we may need to find other businesses in different but close targeted areas across the U.S. The best way to closely target sections of a city is to break down your marketing campaign by zip codes. This is especially handy when you need to take certain demographics within a major city because separate information on a scored value basis is available.

Business to business Marketing has grown substantially over the years, in fact we can take the zip code demagraphic information learned from others to improve your campaigns.

In targeted marketing, there will be times when you must look into the past to determine the demographics of a targeted zip code to find a list of businesses that suit your campaigns needs.

In order to understand the need for zip codes for targeting your b2b campaign, we might first want to understand how and why they came into being:

How Zip Codes came to be:

In the 1930's, the Post Office Department transported majority of its domestic mail by railroad on which they did the massive sorting, and redistributing it by hauling to different cities where each city had a major railroad hub or small Post Office.

Soon businesses began to send important document through the mail and as the states got bigger and business mailings became more detailed (and packages and parcels had to be sent).

It became necessary to ensure that each piece was arriving safely at its desired location. Mail by rail may have had its heyday in the thirties, but it suffered during the years of depression and did not get back on its feet. By the 1960's it was enacted to begin the present day system of zip coding mail, for direct distribution.

With the economic change of the times including the depression and World War II, the United States underwent major changes in their system of belief, and business went from agricultural to more industrial. The entire method of letter distribution changed and transporting of mail to destinations across country also changed.

The President in 1962 appointed an Advisory Board of the Post Office to mechanize the agency and to give priority to the development of some type of coding system that would establish once and for all a standard method of transporting mail to its correct destination. It is a little known fact that this system had been under consideration for over a decade before anyone realized its importance.

It took years before an actual system that worked was found to be effective with mail distribution and the population continually growing. On July 1, 1963, a federal system of ZIP coding was officially put into place by Postmaster General John A Gronouski and a five digit number was assigned to every address in the U.S.

The first five digits signified the geographical area it came from, and the others designated the population concentration and areas accessible to common transportation routes. The last two digits were for which post office the mail was to be sent to and distributed from.

We know now that even with the system that was put into place, we are again outgrowing the available numbers. Every year a new designation of ZIP codes is put into place as areas across the country are broken up into smaller vicinities and give their own designations. In 1983, ZIP+4® was enacted because of that same population growth. It is still so far, the simplest method of getting your mail to where it has to go in the shortest amount of time and it's the best way we've got to find who and what area a parcel, letter or other correspondence needs to go be delivered.

So you have learned about targeting your business list by zip codes, what about targeting by SIC Code in a list?  We have written a nice informative SIC Code explanation to help you understand their importance in a business marketing campaign.