“The catalog business is a pretty simple business model,” says Jim Coogan, president of Sante Fe, NM-based consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics. “Prospect at breakeven, and make your profits by mailing to your buyers.” By adding co-op database names to customer remailings, you can get the best of both worlds.
The next time you prepare to remail a catalog to your best buyers, consider adding hotline prospecting names from the co-op databases. “You the mailer add your hotline transaction buyers since the cutoff of the last merge to the buyer segments that are going into the remail,” Coogan explains. “Send your house file to the co-op database for them to add the super hotline names that have come to the database since cutoff. The database can add ‘balance’ names net of your house file names.”
There is no cost of multibuyers netting out of the merge, he adds, because the databases give you new names net of your house file and net of previous database names.