When Will Response Rates Recover? Part 2

Noting a general trend in your response rates will give you some data to project what the fourth quarter holiday season will look like. But don’t let optimism replace what your own hard data tells you about where response rates are trending.

What tactics have emerged from mailers?

• Look at your first quarter results, and project them forward to the fourth quarter. Don’t assume you’ll do better than your normal increase in response rates between quarter one response and quarter four response. Focus on your most recent response rates, and discount or ignore older historical response rates.
• Co-ops are recommending that marketers optimize their housefiles at one of the co-op databases to find and suppress those households that have shut their wallets.
• Segment your files into multis and singles, or “uniques,” and don’t mail those singles that are currently responding below breakeven.
• Squeeze more names out of the co-op models that are working profitably by increasing slightly your segment sizes.

What should marketers do? Here are two ways to make sure your circ is optimized to take full advantage of the lucrative fourth quarter: