[Re: Loose Cannon: A Tale of Very Snail Mail, Direct Newsline, August 6, 2007]
I love this story of “lost and found”…and hopefully old Kitty was still married to the same guy, so they can celebrate the ring.
Three weeks ago, I had a weird call at the office from a lady whose name was vaguely familiar. My assistant Amanda said she called twice while I was away, so I returned her call, did the voice mail stuff back and forth…and finally spoke with “Somalia.”
Apparently, I had sold her my apartment in New York about 15 years ago, and she recently received a banking statement from my bank there. She said she opened it to see if it was “j_____” mail, and when she saw the balance, wanted to find me. So she spoke to my old superintendent, who said I’d moved to Park Avenue, and he did some checking, and called some neighbors, who had my number in Florida.
Somalia called and then mailed me the statement…doesn’t this just restore your faith in human beings?
So, I trotted over to my bank branch here, and told them to move that account with my other one here. Well, it has been several weeks and I received a call on my voice mail on Friday, saying that they haven’t been able to do it. And they suggested, the next time I’m in New York, that I visit my old branch and see if I can make it happen.
Geeze, where’s CRM, treating the whole customer in the channel of preference, the database wisdom packages…are they going to waste?
Maybe I’ll move the whole account to Sun Trust, which sounds more Florida anyway.
Lois K. Geller
President
Mason & Geller Direct
Hollywood, FL
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Not so fast — and furious — Richard! Just because a name from a 50-year-old list appears on a mailing, let’s not jump to conclusions.
Perhaps some brilliant DMer asked the list manager to find such a list and used it to mail who-knows-what offer. Something that appeals primarily to persons who haven’t moved or changed their names in half a century, perhaps. Needing only a 3% response to sell them on becoming their real estate agent — TODAY! — before they drop dead, sounds plausible.
Or how about a 50th anniversary party, especially if you have nothing to celebrate, so no one else will do it for you?
Fred Hahn
Marketing Consultant
Golden Valley, MN
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Your story of Kitty and her lost ring brings to mind some of the basic principles of marketing through mailing lists.
We seldom recommend a compiled list when a suitable direct response list is available, even if the price is higher. You can get monthly new movers easily, but otherwise most telephone and directory lists are updated only once a year at best.
But the problem of Kitty’s long-lost ring cannot be rare.
The giant consumer databases are still updated mainly by the action of a householder. If you move without filling out the Post Office change of address form; if you never change your phone number or the address associated with that number; if you are still living and have thus escaped being matched against the Social Security deceased index, your name can stay in a demographic database for many years.
I once handled list brokerage in addition to my direct marketing job. Many years ago, I entered a fictitious daughter’s name in such a database — one of those dummy names we all enter to see who is using the lists we rent.
My “Carole” went into the database in the mid 1980s, when the maple trees in our yard were just saplings and she stayed in our household until they were giant shade trees.
Carole received two or three mailing pieces a year; there obviously was not much call for Zip Code 01760, and she would never been picked for a high-rollers list based on nine-digit Zip Code that selects hot real estate prospects.
Her age was never in the database, so she would be passed over in any list enhancement program that would have refreshed the database.
“Carole” never married, and she never departed from our home address to take a fine job in a new city, so she never filed a change of address form; she never ordered her own phone to update the database.
I didn’t count the years, but somewhere, someone finally decreed that all database names that had not been updated in the last 15 or 20 years must be flushed out, and finally Carole stopped receiving mail.
The saddest thing about Carole’s departure from our household when the database dumped her name is that, like Maria von Trapp, she just slipped out during the night without telling us that she was leaving.
Fred Morath
Fred Morath Direct Marketing
Natick, MA
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