State of the Co-ops ’07

Wiland Direct

With its pre-validated customer model, Wiland Direct touts its ability to construct prevalidated response models on the fly — and have them perform well.

Dan Wells, executive vice president of member services, explains that the company takes the data that catalogers have at their fingertips one step further.

“Many of our members have very sophisticated database marketing companies that do some level of analytics,” Wells says, such as recency/freqeuency/monetary segmentation with additional overlays made of products or channels — all of which enables catalogers to know what a specific customer has purchased.

“What Wiland Direct knows through our database,” Wells says, “is what an individual has bought across every other cataloger out there.”

Wiland’s system also includes a customer’s level of profitability to the cataloger. “If a person is profitable all the time,” Wells says, “it’s easy to figure out to mail to that individual. But a strategy should be applied to those customers that don’t purchase anything every time a catalog is mailed.

“It’s around that break-even line,” he adds. “All mailers, right around that break-even line, have clusters of names. This gives them the ability to say, ‘If you don’t contact some of those names right below the line as frequently, they’d actually perform better and come above the line.’”

Carolyn Heinze is a freelance writer/editor based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. You can reach her at carolynheinze@free.fr.