Customer Retention: Get the Best Response From Your Customer File

Special offers are certainly another way to get lapsed customers to respond, but Wheaton cautions that customers who are reactivated in this manner tend to look for similar deals in the future and may again fall inactive once they’re treated like regular customers.

4. Measure incremental rather than total response to your promotions. Wheaton and his colleagues have run tests that show, for certain customer subsets of a catalog housefile, 50 to 75 percent of purchase volume would have occurred whether those customers were promoted to or not. These customers tend to have found the catalog merchandise via the Web, and never give source codes, even after they’ve begun to receive catalog mailings, says Wheaton.