The Iron Rule of RFM

If you’re just getting started in cataloging, you can’t use RFM to guide your mailings for a while, because you won’t have any RFM data to guide you (all your customers will be current-year single buyers with relatively low lifetime sales).

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore coding. If you start coding your mailings immediately, even when your customer file is small and new, you’ll be all ready to take advantage of RFM as soon as your house file becomes large and old enough to benefit from it, which should be two to three years after you start.