Of the 2.3 million catalogs car stereo marketer Crutchfield sends out in each of its three annual mailings, only around 14% are sent to prospects. But the Charlottesville, VA-based company decided even that was too much if some of those potential customers didn’t want the book.
In 1997, Crutchfield ran several rented lists against The Polk Co.’s ChoiceMail database, which names consumers who have indicated they’re not interested in receiving direct mail about certain products and services.
Crutchfield deleted the names of people who didn’t want mail on home and car stereos, compact discs, prerecorded videos and computer software – about 5% of the planned mailing.
Big Savings
Wasn’t this a waste of good list rental dollars? On the contrary. Eliminating those names allowed the company to save money on printing, processing and postage.
“It is at least five times more expensive to put our catalog in the mail than to rent a name,” explains Robin Lebo, Crutchfield’s director of customer acquisitions.
What’s more, purchase rates increased by one-tenth of a percentage point in the year following the first ChoiceMail test.
Lebo, who characterizes the catalog’s usual response rate as “industry standard,” points out that a rise from, say, 1.3% to 1.4% would mean a 7% increase in sales. Not such small potatoes, especially given the average order of around $275.
It took a full year to evaluate the program because Crutchfield’s products are hardly impulse buys. Some prospects receive several catalogs before they make a purchase. Even hand-raisers, the most likely prospects, often get two or three catalogs before buying.
To date, Crutchfield has eliminated 10.5 million names from rented lists by using ChoiceMail.
However, the firm had circulation levels it wanted to maintain. Rather than scale back mailings, it tested a few more lists and took names from the Abacus Alliance cooperative catalog database, all of which were run through ChoiceMail.
Crutchfield also matched segments of its customer file against ChoiceMail. What few dupes there were tended to occur among those names that the cataloger determined would have lower value over the long run.
Key Factor
As car stereos are purchased infrequently, the ability to ensure a higher-value target is important to a marketer with a finite mailing budget.
Lebo suspects that the initial parameters for deciding which ChoiceMail segments to exclude may have been a bit severe. The firm dropped a significant number of names from proven continuation lists like Car Stereo Review – mostly people who didn’t want to receive offers for prerecorded videos and computer software. These segments will be re-evaluated – and likely reinstated – for Crutchfield’s next mail drop.
ChoiceMail offers 102 solicitation categories – books, clothing, health, personal finance and travel, to name only a few – from which a consumer can elect not to receive mail. Each of these is further broken down into sub-categories. Charity alone has 17.
Opting Out
Consumers are most likely to opt out of credit card offers; more than 80% of the ChoiceMail file has done so. At the other end of the spectrum, just over 50% of those on the file don’t wish to receive women’s clothing solicitations.
But the categories consumers left open represent those they’d really like to receive mail from.
According to ChoiceMail product manager Steffie Hemmingson, there is less than a 1 percent overlap between ChoiceMail and the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service file.
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