News
 Multi-Sourced Lists: Responsive, Hot, & Enhanced
By Ari Ginsberg,
Finding a new source that carries the qualities that
makes a mailing successful, namely, transactional
data of recent responders to direct mail, is very
hard to come by. Even the abundance of online
generated leads that has been flooding the market
does not give a sufficient answer to the industry’s
needs.
Many catalogers have found their way to the co-op
databases. These efforts have driven down costs,
enabling the member catalogers to drop more catalogs
and increase response rates.
But the co-ops are not necessarily available to all
mailers, and many do not want to join since they are
required to give up their control over their own
house file. Those who are not willing to should
consider multi-sourced lists.
What is a multi-sourced list? It's a compilation of
mail order transactional data, similar to the likes
of the co-ops, with the following advantages:
1. It is available to all mailers large and
small with no membership required.
2. There is no requirement to expose one’s
own house-file to other users.
3. No need to compromise on the qualities of
the traditional response lists. The multi-Sourced
list is made up of transactional response data which
in most cases include RFM (recencey, frequency,
monetary) information as well.
4. It has considerable quantities across all
categories.
5. The individual participating sources are
deduped one from another, so there is no need for
tedious net arrangement negotiation with each source
individually.
6. Multi-buyers across all sources are
available for a boosted response.
Most multi-sourced lists are either gathered and
owned by some of the larger compilers in the
industry or overlaid by them. Either way, mailers
enjoy unlimited possibilities of demographic and
psychographic enhancements and selects available to
them. This brings me to the three major benefits of
these lists:
7. No guessing as to what list bares the same
characteristics as your target market. Select buyers
within your mailer’s category and use the available
enhancements to create a customized list that fit
your target market.
8. This is not a dead-end list. Need better
performance? Just tighten the target market using
more and better selects.
9. The abundance of information that these
lists have and the size of the lists allows your
mailer to apply a statistical model and reach a
broad market of like names to their existing buyers.
I was hesitant at first to offer my own managed
multi-sourced lists in my mailers’ list
recommendations. Not that I doubted that these are
good lists but I was asking myself how these lists
compare to the first tier of traditional response
lists available.
I have since tested the list selecting buyers within
the appropriate category and adding other available
enhancements, such as age and income.
Sure enough, the multi-sourced list, the one that
does not have an individual sample mail piece or
website attached to it, became one of my mailer’s
leading lists in performance and consistency
---Source: Multichannel Merchant List &
Data Strategies July 28, 2008 newsletter (www.multichannelmerchant.com).
Ari Ginsberg is president of Contact Marketing LLC. ).
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