Saving Profit by Using Advanced List Hygiene

Catalogers can save significant dollars through advanced list hygiene. There are two parts to the conversation about advanced list hygiene:

• here's what list hygiene provides and here are areas identified that you need to decide whether to mail these people; and
• what are the tactics and testing that lead to the business rules to actually capture these savings?

It's the second part that catalogers don't understand. They often ask themselves the following questions (along with my answers):

• Should I mail all the new addresses? Not if they're old housefile names that aren't profitable. Some of the address changes shouldn't get mailed.
• Should I suppress all the old addresses? Yes. Some mailers don't understand this! A proprietary change of address (PCOA) database identifies significantly more names not to mail than a national change of address (NCOA).
• Should I suppress DMA Pander, prisons, APO/FPO (i.e., military mail), etc? Test and see, but usually the answer is yes because these addresses don't respond.
• Why fill in carrier routes? Doesn't co-mail do this? Yes, but you pay based on your carrier route penetration vs. pool penetration, so it works to your benefit to fill those eight and nine carrier routes. The mailability scores are huge. Just mail these bad scores (they're undeliverable) and you'll see really low response, helping you to realize that the mailability scores alone pay for the whole program.

I'm always coming up with tactics and business rules for how to use advanced list hygiene. Many mailers simply don't understand how to implement the beautiful data that comes out of advanced list hygiene. Here are some tactics: