Database Marketing

Co-op databases provide a valuable source of quality names for many product offers. For most small- and medium-sized catalog companies, 50 percent or more of prospecting circulation goes to names selected from such databases. Prospect names selected from co-ops are a good value for the money. Why? First, the names are selected according to a model, which means they resemble your own customer database. Second, the names rent for less than most outside response lists. They’re “net” of your housefile, which translates to a lower cost per net name. Co-ops may appear to be about half the cost of outside lists, but in

Evaluating a service bureau is a tough task. Comparing one service bureau to another is even more challenging. Do you compare pricing, services or products? I say compare everything. Just as keeping a check on processing costs is important, postage discounts equally will affect your bottom line. Choose a stable company, as well as one that takes some risks to improve its product line — a service bureau must have the technology necessary to assist its clients. Following is a basic checklist of what to look for when choosing a service bureau. Check prices. Look not only at actual costs but also

Recently, there’s been a push to build sophisticated regression models using the latest technologies and techniques. And rightly so! The gains in both processing speed and capacity have enabled statisticians to incorporate large amounts of catalog, retail and Internet data, as well as demographics, to generate results specifying the best names to mail. A marketing professional is considered remiss if he or she isn’t testing a regression model with various vendors. While these analyses reflect some of every cataloger’s database marketing efforts, there are some areas that commonly are neglected. I’ll discuss one of these: measuring the success of your recent marketing efforts

As a cataloger, no doubt you always want to increase the amount of revenue per catalog (RPC) mailed to your housefile and to outside prospects. As you boost circulation, your RPC will decrease since catalogs are being sent to lower-performing names, generally to prospects. So a general caveat: The more you mail, the less RPC you’ll achieve. Increasing RPC most often will result in increasing your bottom line. So if you grow by increasing circulation, how can you maintain or increase the RPC? This month I offer 10 proven ways to increase your RPC. 1. Add pages. By adding pages

Many catalogers use their marketing databases to look at response data for list analysis and segmentation or for data modeling — all good stuff that can benefit your campaign results. But there may be dozens of other benefits you can reap from your data — benefits that come from analyzing transactional information of what’s being purchased along with the response information of who is buying. Then you can use those data to build a more effective catalog. Five Steps to Success Following are five steps that can help you get the most out of your marketing database. 1. Look at what’s

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.

Many metrics are used to run a profitable catalog business. For example, an apparel company may set a goal for its overall return rate of 22 percent, while a gift mailer may strive for less than 6 percent. But one thing is universal among catalogers: The ideal metrics or ratios are those that lead to profitable income statements. After all, if you manage by the ratios, the dollars will take care of themselves. Remember, dollars go into the bank, not percentages. Key metrics to calculate and watch include service levels (e.g., how long customers wait in your contact center’s queue), response levels (e.g.,

At Lett Direct, we sometimes conduct studies to determine how quickly companies fulfill catalog requests (i.e., inquiries). While some catalogers do a great job turning around requests, many don’t. Unsolicited (and solicited) catalog requests can be extremely valuable, and a high percentage convert into buyers. Therefore, inquiry fulfillment needs to be monitored more closely and given a higher priority. This month, I’ll discuss the importance of inquiry fulfillment and provide results of a recent study we conducted. Unsolicited catalog requests come from many sources. We don’t always know their origins, but we do know inquiries are “diamonds in the rough.” If someone takes

Gathering new buyer names for your housefile presents a challenge in any economic climate. But consumers’ current spartan buying habits have some catalogers puzzling about how, or even how much, to prospect. Some are using new avenues, while others staunchly stick to the basics. Associate Editor Gabrielle Mosquera asked three catalogers to share their thoughts on prospecting in today’s challenging environment. Larry Brown founder, Whatever Works catalog Market: business-to-consumer Type of products: garden, home and pest-control items Catalog Success: What do you think are the most popular prospecting media for catalogers today and why? Brown: As always, it’s other catalogs and their databases

Planning your circulation strategy is about more than just selecting which prospect names or housefile segments to mail. Merge/purge is critical to the success of your mailing, too. How you instruct your service bureau to run the merge can affect your mailing results. This month, I’ll discuss how to assign list priorities, treat multi-buyers and deal with family groups. Of course, the main reason for running a merge is to identify and eliminate duplicates from your mail file. A merge will identify two types of duplicates: duplicates between files (known as inter-file dupes) and duplicates within a file (or intra-file dupes). When duplicates