News
 Do
You Know the Average Life Span of Your Product?
By Bill Singleton
If your purchase history file goes back far enough
to include the expected date that some of your
products will wear out or fail, you can give your
customers an incentive to replace their old
purchases with new models that you carry, says Bill
Singleton, president of Singleton Marketing.
In other words, if you know a product’s MTBF – mean
time between failure, or the average life span of a
product and you capture the model numbers and
purchase dates in your customer files, you can use
that information to contact customers with timely
offers.
Let’s say you sell household appliances such as
refrigerators, freezers, washers, and dryers. They
usually fail between 12 and 18 years after purchase.
You can extract the names and addresses of the
people who bought those items in that time range,
update them by running them against the National
Change of Address (NCOALink™) file, and mail them a
percentage-off offer to replace those aging
appliances with new units.
This idea might seem farfetched, Singleton says, but
consider that the 2000 Census noted that 54.1
percent of people over five years of age lived in
the same house five years ago, 79.1 percent in the
same county, and 88.7 percent in the same state. The
chances of your reconnecting with the original
purchaser of that appliance are good, and for an
item with a shorter MTBF your chances of reaching
the purchaser with your offer are even better.
-- Bill Singleton is president of Algonquin,
Ill.-based database marketing firm, Singleton
Marketing.
Published in Multichannel Merchant’s Lists and Data
Strategies e-mail newsletter
Feb 14, 2005
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