What You Should Know About a Merge-Purge

Multi-buyers

The merge also creates a file of duplicated records for future mailings — these are called multi-buyers. They’re names that have “hit” on one or more rented lists.

Normally, they’re categorized by how many times the record appears in the merge (for instance, a two-time multi is a record that appeared in the merge twice). It was mailed for the first time under the list where it was assigned, and it can be mailed a second time in a future mailing for no additional list-rental expense (after all, you’ve already paid two list owners for the same name). Multis are captured only for outside lists since there’s no benefit to pulling housefile names out of their RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) cells.