Live from DMDNY: Rodale’s Health-based File Pumps Up the Bucks

For a marketer seeking prospects, choosing lookalike consumers from comparable lists– say, married women within urban households – is an obvious step.

It’s a strategy that can work if the marketer is within a related field. But Rodale Inc., a publisher of health and fitness books and magazines, would argue that by going beyond simple selects, lists from seemingly unrelated industries may be transformed into well-performing sources of names.

“It’s not that easy to sell to catalogers who may or may not see synergies,” said Marijke Bekaert, director of marketing database operations for Rodale, speaking at DMD New York. As an incentive, Rodale typically offers a $20 per thousand discount to non-affinity catalog renters – those that might be reluctant to test a publishing list.

While the lower cost won’t hurt renters’ return on investment, an apparel cataloger would still have to make a leap of faith to trust that it and Rodale would have customers in common. To its credit, Rodale attempts shore up this belief with science. Marketers testing publisher’s lists start by creating a profile of their best customers, using a sample of around 100,000 individuals.

Rodale compares this slice of its client’s file and the 15 million active customers within its own database. The Rodale file is fed by the nine magazines and 100+ health-related books it publishes every year.

Rodale strives to augment every member of its master file with upward of 1,500 variables, including promotion and purchase history, demographic and lifestyle data from outside sources, and information gleaned from events, warranty cards and surveys. This allows the Emmas, PA-based firm to have a rounder view of consumers within its file.

Rodale then matches the potential client’s list against its own file of names, allowing it to generate a profile using the overlay information each name on its master list contains. While the client may know that his list consists of married urban women, that they are between the ages of 46 and 55, with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 is useful as well.

But this is basic list append games. Where Rodale turns science to magic is when it correlates these characteristics to lookalikes within one of its lists. If the target audience indexes highly with Rodale’s Nutrition enthusiast segment, the client suddenly has a new source of names available. These names are put through a regression analysis program, enabling Rodale’s client to select those names most likely to become valuable customers.

This yields a high-propensity, high-affinity group of prospects. Rodale offers one more service just to put the campaigns over the top: Attitudinal data, which allows marketers to generate messages to cells within the list.

By offering insight into consumers’ propensities, Rodale can steer a marketer’s campaign to include – or avoid a wide variety of likes and dislikes within its collateral. A gourmet food marketer, for instance, could offer a variation on its catalog cover based on an individual’s taste for wine or vegetarian cooking. Rodale now counts catalogers like Harry and David, Pleasant Co. and Plow & Hearth, as well as the non-profit organization American Heart Association among its successful list users, according to Bekaert.