Donnelley Marketing

During a presentation of his firm’s new B-to-B co-op database, LexBase, at last week’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) 2007 Conference in Chicago, Edith Roman Associates President Stevan Roberts presented a case study involving a 20-year-old (unnamed) cataloger that mailed 10 million catalogs per year and was looking to mail companies with more than 250 employees. “We took records from its file and matched them against our e-mail database,” Roberts explained. As a result, he claimed the cataloger increased orders by 26 percent within the first year. The cataloger sought out LexBase, which has been operational but not fully rolled out to all B-to-B

The recent surge in company mergers and acquisitions within the list and database industry has spurred constant debate. Some believe these acquisitions will help strengthen the industry with better, more powerful resources available to clients. Others fear they’ll lessen the core quality needed to serve catalogers and other customers — service. At last week’s DMA List Day in New York, a panel of list industry leaders — John Healey, president/CEO of PRIMIS; Ed Mallin, president of infoUSA Services Group; and Lonnie Mandel, president/CEO of Specialists Marketing — attempted to shed some light on the recent developments, primarily infoUSA’s flurry of acquisitions over the past

This article will give you a basic understanding of how housefile statistical models work. Additionally, it will show the various ways a marketer unfamiliar with statistical models can provide input to the development process to optimize model performance. It seems there’s a word for every type of phobia known, including “triskaidekaphobia,” which is a fear of the number 13. Yet I was surprised I couldn’t find a word for the fear of statistics — indeed, “statisticaphobia” is a word that really should exist. From experience, I know that catalog marketers without backgrounds in statistics often are ill at ease when participating in model-development

Personalization and one-to-one marketing have become hot customer relationship management (CRM) topics in recent years. Indeed, glowing case studies from the direct marketing industry abound. Yet the core concept of personalizing print promotions has been slow to gain acceptance by catalog marketers in particular. Why? Their reluctance may be due to past experiences in the traditional print catalog world, where the incremental cost to vary the offer can be prohibitive. As a result, most print catalog promotions deliver a product-centric message. To be sure, that can work for some catalogers, but it still doesn’t tap into the notion of true one-to-one marketing.

Want to raise productivity levels in your mail and call centers? Who doesn’t—especially in the wake of the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) latest round of rate increases. To be sure, postal/mailing solutions encompass a vast array of products and services. Here we offer a small sampling of the numerous technology applications designed to save your company’s mail and call centers time and money. This list, while far from exhaustive, includes software that you can purchase, free applications available to customers of some outsource providers and Web-based application service providers. When known, we’ve included some cost estimates for these solutions and services.

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?

“Compared to the business-to-business arena, consumer direct marketing is a no-brainer.” —Lee Kroll, Kroll Direct Marketing Many will disagree with Lee Kroll’s statement. But I, for one, think he’s dead on. Read on, consider all of the challenges the b-to-b marketer faces when it comes to lists, and decide for yourself. Consumer Direct Marketing The universe has roughly 110 million households. Most receive mail in a box or through a slot in the front door. They answer their own telephones. True, in the words of Chicago freelancer Lea Pierce, “All mail is opened over the wastebasket.” But, chances are pretty good that if you