Database Marketing

Planning your circulation strategy is about more than just selecting which prospect names or housefile segments to mail. Merge/purge is critical to the success of your mailing, too. How you instruct your service bureau to run the merge can affect your mailing results. This month, I’ll discuss how to assign list priorities, treat multi-buyers and deal with family groups. Of course, the main reason for running a merge is to identify and eliminate duplicates from your mail file. A merge will identify two types of duplicates: duplicates between files (known as inter-file dupes) and duplicates within a file (or intra-file dupes). When duplicates

Timing tests, list tests, cover tests, select tests — testing can do wonderful things for your catalog, and carefully thought-out tests should be in every circulation plan you create. However, that “carefully thought-out” part can get embarrassing. But They’re All Getting the Same Thing A national business-to-business cataloger wanted to test how mailing one less catalog per year to each buyer segment would impact sales. Executives split a large buyer segment into two unequal parts, mailed the usual number to the larger segment (control), and one less to the smaller (test). In each flight (single mail drop) where test and control both got

Multi-buyers are the gold that all catalogers hope to uncover. These prospective buyers don’t just have a demographic propensity to purchase what you sell, they’ve proven their loyalty to catalog shopping in general. And that means they’re likely to buy by catalog again. John Lenser, a long-time catalog industry professional whose credits include being founder of San Francisco Music Box and past president of Hearthsong, is now president of Lenser Consulting and works with catalog clients on circulation planning and list strategies. He recently shared insights into the current catalog list market and ideas on the best ways to take advantage of multi-buyer sources.

With fewer hotline names and a scarcity of new rental lists to test, catalogers have been faced with a drought of new names to mail this year. Seeking ways to beef up their mail plans with quality names at the lowest possible cost, more catalogers appear to be tapping into cooperative catalog databases. Catalog co-ops have been around for more than a decade. But only recently have some reached the size and scope needed to become a substantial piece of your prospecting plan—making many catalogers more apt to ramp up usage of this alternative source of lists. “There’s certainly been a greater receptivity to

Evaluating customers based on accurate and timely data—especially behavioral and demographic data—has given catalogers who understand and leverage the value of a marketing database the ability to achieve significant performance gains. But in terms of understanding customers and marketing to them as wisely as possible, this technique is just a beginning. Indexing transactional activity (that is, matching all activity to the appropriate customer) creates an even higher level of marketing database utility—a truly customer-centric view of behavioral data. With this kind of data you can improve customer segmentation simply because the data is more accurately rolled up, easier to access and “cleaner”

After nearly 20 years in business-to-business marketing, Pam Maxwell is convinced of one thing: Most companies don’t understand the value of their data. At Interline Brands, a $630 million distributor of maintenance and repair products, she feels fortunate to work in a company that believes in the role data can play in catalog marketing. Among Interline’s catalog brands are Barnett, Wilmar, Sexauer, Maintenance USA and Hardware Express. Maxwell came to her current post in January 2001, after 18 years in sales and marketing for Airgas, a distributor of industrial gas. She started there right out of high school and moved into supervisory positions after

Until two years ago, George Michie made his career teaching high school students the basics of economics, math, physics and government. Of his move into the catalog field, Michie says, “I was ready to do something different.” Working the analytical side of marketing seemed a logical fit for his background in numbers. At Crutchfield, Michie was hired to help the company re-think the metrics for its customer-acquisition efforts. “We had been relying on numbers with foundations more historical than analytical,” Michie recalls. His assignment: To figure out if these really were the numbers the company should be following? He says the ultimate

You invest a significant amount of time and effort to maintain your customer marketing database. Indeed, you have tightly monitored procedures to be sure all new activity is applied correctly, customer summations are accurate, and the names and addresses are kept current. In time, your database has grown in both size and scope as your business has evolved. But are you getting the most out of what you’re putting into it? As you consider the wealth of information you now maintain on each customer, have you taken the necessary steps to leverage all available data elements to optimize your customer mailing selects?

A continuous threat to the health of any company is the loss of customers. That makes prospecting efforts all the more important, because newly acquired customers are worth more in the future. Profits rise because repeat sales rise, and most profits come from repeat sales. Your catalog’s attrition can be mapped using many variables. Recency, or how long ago customers made purchases, is the most common. Total spending, average amount spent, method and type of purchase are common variables used to estimate attrition by customer segments. Demographics and psychographics also may be helpful predictors. A common strategy for marketers is to re-contact all

Because it’s expensive to prospect for new buyers, it’s important to prospect as cost efficiently as possible. Prospecting is critical to the long-term success of any catalog business. How much prospecting you do depends on how fast you want to grow your customer file. Too much prospecting will negatively impact your bottom line. But too little isn’t good either. The goal is to maintain a balance between mailings to your housefile and to prospects. Every housefile has a certain attrition rate. Prospect so you’re at least replacing the customers who’ve decided not to buy. This month, I’ll review basic, proven ways