Meet the Broker: Nancy Liddane
Today we meet Nancy Liddane, a regional sales rep for Lorena, TX-based Market Approach Consulting. Liddane, who works from a home office in New Jersey, brokers lists for local businesses, regional chapters of nonprofits and companies in the insurance, timeshare and travel industries.
Liddane has made a living with lists since 1983, switching back and forth between brokerage and management. Most of her career, she’s worked with consumer mailers and nonprofits.
“Now I’m doing brokerage again. I work with e-mail, postal response and compiled lists,” says Liddane. “Some of the clients I work with are telemarketing companies and printers who need lists for their clients.”
Her clients include Med South Health, Mailmax Direct and AlphaGraphics.
Liddane started out as a list registrar at Names in the News before moving on to Carol Enters List Co., where she became an assistant list broker. Later she worked for Enertex Marketing, MKTG Services, American List Counsel and VentureDirect, before joining Market Approach one year ago this month.
“I probably use more compiled lists now because many of the companies that I’m working with are small, which means the minimum orders and costs for response lists would be too high for them,” says Liddane.
She follows the conventional wisdom that brokers are at their best and most successful when they diversify in three or four market niches. She strives to remain flexible while not spreading herself spread too thin.
Liddane is mindful that it’s okay to specialize in one area while getting knowledge in others. It’s because over time niche specialties for any broker will probably change.
“The list business is still based largely on personal relationships and it’s important for a broker to know the managers and other brokers working in the same markets. Specializing in a few niches is good for getting business through word of mouth,” says Liddane.
When she’s not working, Liddane likes to read murder mysteries, play golf or go horseback riding. She does fundraising volunteer work for the Moose Club. Liddane and her husband often spent time in the Catskills Mountains region of New York State, visiting with friends and family.
How much has the list business changed during your career?
Liddane sees reflections of the past in the evolution of the industry. The rapid growth of e-mail list opportunities remind her of how it was for postal lists 15 plus years ago.
“Back then there weren’t as many postal lists and the targeting wasn’t as good as it is today,” Liddane says.
Postal and e-mail lists are becoming more comparable in terms of the response rates, which may lead to improvements in e-mail list segmentation, she notes.
Open rates for e-mail are still higher than postal mail, but in terms of actual response or conversion to sales—response has been declining to levels similar to postal mail, according to Liddane.
What’s most ironic, she says, is that list order processing time seems to be getting slower, as some companies separate tasks that used to be handled by one person.
“One person might be taking orders and another handling the counts and then there’s someone else can’t do something without another person. It reminds me of how it used to take three weeks to get list orders processed, but that was before everything was computerized,” says Liddane.
What are some of the characteristics of a quality list?
Besides the data source, it’s critical to know how often the list is updated and cleaned. It means always asking questions about the age of data. A file may say last-12-month names, but what matters is when was that 12-month period.
“There’s a difference between updating and cleaning a list. Some lists are updated every month, but never cleaned to remove inaccurate information,” Liddane says.
Ideally, lists should be updated and cleaned monthly, quarterly or at least twice a year, which should include matching against the National Change of Address (NCOA) list, she says.
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