PROSPECTING CAN BE A DICEY business, especially for a continuity mailer. But International Masters Publishers Inc. has figured out how to minimize the risk.
For starters, the firm identifies lists that produce poor payment and tightens the criteria when it can, said IMP's Janette Barrett. This may be necessary even when the list generates a good response.
“Look at the source of the list,” Barrett said during the Direct Marketing Association's List Vision 2006 conference in New York. “Is the list owner giving you mail names, or are they including TV names in there? That will bring the pay-up down.”
Another trick is to apply prior mail omits. This is helpful when response is poor.
“Ask the list owner to omit prior usage,” Barrett continued. “Most people will omit prior campaigns, but maybe you can go back six or 12 months.”
The company, which markets recipe cards and related products, also uses a variety of suppression files, including one listing prisoners.
“Our free starter offer is knives, and I don't think we should be mailing into prisons with our knives,” Barrett laughed.
Also useful is the firm's own bad-debt file of customers sent to collection agencies, and other lists of slow payers and no-payers.
“We have bad debtors, householders who have paid zero, people who only pay for the intro and late payers in the current billing series,” Barrett said.
The National Change of Address list also is important, as are the enhanced NCOA files offered by many companies. But Barrett cautioned that “you have to do the cross-benefit analysis to make sure it pays for itself.”
Finally, there are product-specific suppression models, which knock out the bottom 5% to 10% of names after a merge.
Barrett urged mailers to use “the same model cutoff for every file. Some lists that tend to be more responsive and worse payers will have a higher hit rate on the bottom part of the model.”
International Masters Publishers is the North American arm of global continuity marketer IMP Group. It mails 30 million pieces per year (Direct, June 15).
Those mailings are expensive. Thus, it's important to “suppress unprofitable names” up front, Barrett said.
