Segment and Conquer

Many catalogers segment their lists into one-time, two-time, and three-time-plus buyers. But another way to segment your multibuyers is by source.

“The definition of ‘multibuyers’ is becoming less clear,” says Jim Coogan, president of Santa Fe, NM-based Catalog Marketing Economics. “There is the problem of ‘exchange exuberance,’ where catalogers are putting lots of low-value exchange names into the merge because they are almost free. This creates some low-value rental list multis.” According to Coogan, mailers are putting old house file names into the merge with the intent of creating as many multibuyer names as possible.

Coogan doesn’t suggest that you stop segmenting multibuyers from one-time buyers or nonbuyers. Instead, he advises classifying your multibuyers into additional segments, such as house multis, co-op multis, and rental multis.

“The first thing you’ll find is that some rental list singles can’t be mailed above breakeven,” Coogan says. “When you have poor-performing singles, you can either not mail those names or send them to a co-op database to be optimized to drop the poor-performing households.”