B-to-B Prospecting: Dig Deeper for Better Names
Wary of List Fatigue
Has this deep mining of transactional data exhausted the marketplace? Is list fatigue an epidemic waiting to happen, as it has on the consumer side? “Most mailers in the alliance haven’t seen a decline in performance,” Hawes claims. “Although we’re not growing contacts as rapidly as we once were, we’re increasing the number of transactions associated with each contact. We’ve flattened out to about 75 million contacts in the last 18 to 24 months, but the buying profile of these contacts has gotten much more robust.” This past February, Abacus reported a 2 percent increase in B-to-B buyers compared to February 2005.
A columnist for Retail Online Integration, George founded HAGUEdirect, a marketing agency. Previously he was a member of the Shawnee Mission, Kan.-based consulting and creative agency J. Schmid & Assoc. He has more than 10 years of experience in circulation, advertising, consulting and financial strategy in the catalog/retail industry. George's expertise includes circulation strategy, mailing execution, response analysis and financial planning. Before joining J. Schmid, George worked as catalog marketing director at Dynamic Resource Group, where he was responsible for marketing and merchandising for the Annie's Attic Needlecraft catalog, the Clotilde Sewing Notions catalog, the House of White Birches Quilter's catalog and three book clubs. George also worked on corporate acquisitions.
