The Iron Rule of RFM

What trouble spots should I avoid when using RFM to create a mailing strategy?

There’s really only one: You must take special care when purging duplicate names from your house file.

The reason is that modern cataloging software saves variables for RFM directly in the customer master file, along with each customer’s name and address. So if John Smith appears twice in your file both as John Smith and as J. Smith, you can’t just erase the record for J. Smith, because that would also erase whatever RFM data has been stored in J. Smith’s record. Before removing any dupe, you must first intelligently transfer the dupe’s RFM data into the surviving non-dupe record.