Want to tap into some overlooked names? Try the ship-tos and giftees on your house file. They will respond better than requestors and on a par with your older buyers.
But don’t mix them up—they’re two different sets of people. Giftees have received gifts from your buyers. Ship-tos are consumers who have different shipping and billing addresses. The best practice is to split them into one of the following categories:
1. Ship-to records with same name as the bill-to (these would be true ship-tos).
2. Ship-to records with a different name from the bill-to (assumed to be giftees in most cases).
Some mailers say that the first segment isn’t worth mailing. Why send a duplicate catalog to the billing address? But the addresses may be different for reasons that are invisible to us.
One buyer may ship gifts to the Aspen hotel the family is staying in on Christmas. Another may buy furniture for a second home. Yet another may purchase gifts for clients and use a home address for billing but a work address for shipping. Finally, city dwellers might have their purchases shipped to their work address for better deliverability and tracking.
One mailer recently tested ship-tos vs. giftees. The winner? The ship-tos, and there’s no mystery why. Ship-tos (with the same name) are buyers, so their response rates will be higher. Giftees are marginally better than a prospect name—they’re familiar with your brand and merchandise from the gift they received. But perhaps they’ve forgotten it already. Or worse, the buyer chose badly and they’ve already re-gifted the item.
You can determine through testing how deeply to mail into the ship-tos and giftees just as you do with other parts of your house file. You may find it necessary to optimize some of the older ones, but remember to put them through the merge first to identify the multi-buyers. The more variables you can test, the smarter you will mail.
Alexandra Singer is senior circulation and marketing manager with San Rafael, CA-based catalog consultancy Lenser.