DM Vet Dunn Offers Her Best Practices

Among the assorted direct and online marketing trade groups, large and small, national and regional, the Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association (HVDMA), which holds frequent get-togethers in Westchester and Fairfield counties in the New York metropolitan area, has a knack for finding speakers who can closely relate to its audience. At its most recent luncheon last week in Greenwich, Conn., this small group invited direct marketing veteran JoAnne Monfradi Dunn, president/CEO of the Brewster, N.Y.-based database services firm Alliant Cooperative Data Solutions, to give her views of the direct marketing world and assorted pointers.

Dunn’s come a long way since getting her start at a Washington, D.C.-based insurance firm. As she told the 50 or so members on hand, she’s spent a number of years at several companies in her career, made her mark and moved on. Emphasizing the need to be proactive rather than reactive, her résumé illustrates just that, starting with her “escape” from that insurance firm upon learning that her boss was involved in an insurance scandal. She got out of there before the man wound up serving two years in prison.

Dunn got her real start in direct marketing as a “statistical typist” at Time-Life Books. There, she not only learned statistics, but also eventually found herself acquiring 120 million names from lists per year for Time-Life. She’d later start the Norman Rockwell Museum catalog in Stockbridge, Mass., mentored by Stockbridge’s most famous cataloger, Lee Williams of Country Curtains. She later got into list management before eventually launching Alliant in the early 2000s.

In the luncheon’s informal setting, peppered by questions from HVDMA Vice President Sheryl Benjamin (from list firm Direct Media) as well as the audience, Dunn offered several tips:

On Good Hiring

* Hire the best people you can, and develop them the best you can, Dunn said.

* Conduct lots of interviews and testing.

* Make sure they fit into the organization and company culture, and live close enough to your offices so it’s commutable for them to get to and from work easily.

* But if they don’t work out, fire them fast.

On the Development of DM Pros

* Ask lots of questions, network and take classes — most notably, a statistics course.

* Execute good customer service internally, she said, “because if that’s not done well, external customer service stinks.”

* Develop strong writing and presentation skills.

* Don’t be afraid to ask questions or take risks.

* Don’t compromise yourself; have good ethics.

On Using Data to Drive Insight Into Your Marketing Campaigns

* You can’t work with too much data, she noted. But what do you do with all that data? “You need someone who understands that data and can turn it to develop that customer. It’s how you use the data that counts.”

* Although recency/frequency/monetary still works in database marketing, “you need transactional data to determine if they respond to offers, whether they return and/or buy more,” she said.

* There’s a trend toward transactional predictive data. “The more we use that data,” Dunn said, “the more responsible our mailings will be.”