What You Should Know About a Merge-Purge

- Deduct any intra-file duplicates from your list-rental invoice.

Outside List-rental Restrictions

What if certain list owners won’t let you make promotional offers to their customers? How do you keep these people from being mailed? What happens if they show up on the multi-buyer file?

In the merge/purge, put all rented lists on “random allocation.” This means that if a name hits two lists, the name resides on list A and is dropped from list B. The next time a duplicate is found, it resides on list B and is dropped from list A (hence, they’re randomly allocated). It’s likely that a name on any given list will be knocked out, while the name survives on another rented list. Bottom line: As long as you don’t mail the offer to the rented list whose owner declined your offer, you should be fine.