Welcome to Broker Roundtable, where each week we ask list brokers to give their opinions on issues that matter to the marketing community. This week’s question: In the current climate, what are some ways to keep names fresh?
Our panel includes Becky Hagadorn of Carney Direct; Matt Kaiser of Veradata; Leland Kroll of Kroll Direct Marketing Inc. and Linda Sandler of Adrea Rubin Marketing Inc. Would you like to be considered to be a member of our roundtable? Contact Larry Riggs ([email protected]).
Becky Hagadorn, vice president, new business development, Carney Direct:
Continuing to engage consumers is the key to freshness. This is where social networking is powerful. The goal isn’t always to push sales. Educate your prospects on value and benefits. Work with a company expert in social strategy and remarketing. Allowing consumers to gain trust in your company, brand or service prolongs the customer lifecycle, giving you thus fresh data.
Matt Kaiser, executive vice president of Veradata:
As marketers, we have inexpensive mechanisms of maintaining fresh names on our file. Email, for example, is a cheap and easy means of nurturing our client lists while updating information and keeping the interaction fresh. Not nearly enough direct marketers capitalize on simple-to-execute best practices that would keep their names engaged. If not email, we have mobile. If not mobile, we have personal URLs. If not PURLs, we have private and public social networks.
With the right team, the right consultants and the right strategy, we live in a time where immediate communication is possible with every name on our list. The current climate is actually a benefit to smart marketers who are negotiating aggressively for better deals on many of the services that would enable these steps to maintain freshness. Business as a whole is more price competitive today, but we have more technology options as well. Now is a very good time to experiment.
Leland Kroll, president, Kroll Direct Marketing Inc.:
Why in this climate more than any other climate? Data in any form needs to be kept clean and deliverable. Certainly using data enhancements helps to verify and clean data as part of the hygiene process. Online publishers should embrace the traditional list managers and brokers by having us assist them in eliminating and formatting the online registration data that they are generating. We typically see 25% to 35% of daily traffic not qualifying as being deliverable data. That’s a lot of information being left of the cutting room floor.
Linda Sandler, executive vice president, marketing, Adrea Rubin Marketing:
I have noticed that mailers are building in more time for processing, not less. This is truly changing the definition and the responsiveness of hotline data. If mailers want to keep names fresh, they could consider looking at their processing time to determine if their processes can be tightened up. In addition, mailers still need to allocate room for testing in their campaigns. While I understand the need to mail closer to the vest and structure campaigns to mail the best performing files, testing is still extremely important for the growth of an organization. Therefore, 10-15% of a campaign should be allocated to testing fresh names and more importantly, new sources of data. For example, if New Movers is a category that performs well for a given mailer, mailers could test this trigger with a tighter recency such as weekly.
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