Harley-Davidson's Retail Traffic Builers (1,171 words)

USE ONE MAIL STREAM, SAVE MONEY

Dealers have their custom catalogs mailed through a Banta central processing facility. They mail only within their sales region. This single mail stream is the most economical solution for the dealers to drop catalogs.

Harley's list database management firm generates the catalog mailing list from a variety of sources, including each dealer's territory list (ranging in number of names from 75 to 8,000), and these are combined using Sybase. Banta processes the electronic file to maximum postal efficiency, says Bear. He also points out the crucial relationship between data collection and binding. The first must be optimized for the second to work smoothly, Bear says.