Segment Co-op Database Names and Models
Most mailers could stand to segment their cooperative database selections to fine-tune prospecting. Here are two suggestions on how to do it.
Lists & Data - Business
What Direct Merchants Can Learn From Direct Marketers
Being an active member of both multichannel retail and direct marketing communities, I
Five Questions to Ask When Testing Rentals
If you’re testing names, how do you know you selected the right list? At a session titled “Maneuvering Through the Merge/Purge for Best Response Rates” at the Annual Conference for Catalogers and Multichannel Merchants (ACCM) in Boston last month, Lane posed five questions mailers should ask of every list test.
Testing Suppression Files
Besides the
Find Your Geographic Sweet Spots and Dead Zones
Mailers have used zip tables for years to find hot areas to mail deeper and poor areas to avoid. You should consider optimizing your prospecting lists by geographic sweet spots to squeeze more profitable response from prospecting, while cutting out your catalog’s dead zones.
Bottom-Feeding with Cooperative Database Models
Catalogers must cut waste out of their circulation to fight the spiraling costs postage, paper and printing. A powerful tool for eliminating non-responsive names is to test the bottom of your house file reactivation models.
Using Catalogs to Drive Retail Traffic
In addition to the typical modus operandi of ordering retail trade area prospecting models from the co-ops, there is a good source of names hidden in the housefile segments, and in prospect lists normally overlooked for traditional catalog mailings, due to marginal performance. There is still some retail gold left in those marginal names you may be thinking of discarding.
Show Me the Data: Compiled Lists Aren’t Commodities
There are roughly 55,000 lists for rent today. About 24,000 lists are business and government focused; response, subscription, and compiled files. The mailers and list brokers I have worked with often talk about the compiled files as commodities. Different business-to-business lists characterized by similar demographics such as: standard industry classification (SIC) codes, employee sizes, annual sales, and geographic regions are expected to perform equally well.
Bounce-proof Your E-mail Lists
Thanks to error-ridden databases, privacy concerns, and excess spam, as well as the high turnover of e-mail addresses, many marketers are now finding they are losing e-mail addresses faster than they can gain them. Customer retention has reemerged as the key to profits.
List and Data Strategies: Spring-Clean Those House Files!
Catalogers could never afford to waste paper and postage mailing to old or incorrect addresses; with the new postal changes, keeping your list as clean as possible is more important than ever. And once the Postal Service’s stricter address standardization rules go into effect in August, unkempt lists will be even more costly.