10 Proven Ways to Increase Your Outside List Performance

It’s a double-edged sword with lower response rates and higher costs. As catalogers, we need to do all things possible to improve outside list results. Here are 10 proven ways to increase the RPC (revenue per catalog):

1. Study how each list performs over time. We tend to look at list performance only by drop. But it’s better to look at list performance over time. How many times can you mail each list per year/season? Perhaps you can mail a particular list more often in order to increase the RPC. Or you could be mailing a list too often, which reduces your RPC. The danger of overmailing a list is the performance can fall off to the point where it looks like you can’t use the list, when that might not be the case at all.