Database Marketing: Mining for Gold

National Allergy Supply outsources its data collection, which, while potentially more efficient in some ways, puts the company at the mercy of its provider. The information is supplied on the vendor’s schedule rather than on the cataloger’s. “When we did this in-house, I used to be able to pull up our back-office administration and very quickly see anything I needed to see, such as how certain e-mail campaigns were working,” Fry says. “I can still see some of that, but I only see the details once a month, on the vendor’s schedule.”