Mining Your Customer Files

THE DATABASE DRIVES CUSTOMER MARKETING

As catalogers track customer orders and maintain all-important purchase history, they can differentiate between poor, average, good and great customers. An important starting place in segmenting customers is to build a simple RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) chart for all buyers. This chart will be different for every mailer as each catalog has different price points affecting the monetary range in the chart. Frequency of purchase will also vary: An office or computer supply catalog might get six or more purchases a year from good customers. A gift catalog might get one order per year.