|
Introduction
At a not-so-long-ago List Vision event held by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), I remember hearing either Don Mokrynski or Mal McCluskey state that the number of datacards had practically tripled in recent years. The result: An overwhelming job for brokers trying to make sense of the prospecting opportunities for clients.
While I understand the difficulty such datacard proliferation presents to brokers and mailers, it also represents a step forward in the list industry recognizing a need for more segmented and digestible list files.
And that diversity is showing up all over the list business. This special report details the immense work going into turning consumer and business data into predictive sources of future behavior. On top of that, there are numerous market reach opportunities involving partnerships, sponsorships and more options that aren't exactly list-based.
As Deb Goldstein, the DMA's 2005 List Leader of the Year puts it, "More data is available to marketers these days than just list rentals." The future of the direct marketing industry depends on "list" professionals changing their business models along with that of their clients.
--Hallie Mummert, Editor in Chief
What a Mailer Wants
Prospecting trends from the list owner's point of view
Gone are the days when prospecting for new customers meant simply renting a list and mailing the names. To compete in a multichannel world with jaded consumers who feel accosted by advertising, marketers want—make that need—more than names and addresses.
Depending on how you look at it, this can be a good development. This new environment requires all marketers to do what direct marketing legends deemed necessary more than a decade ago: Spend more time on lists. Today's lists involve more complex processes of building the files up with tremendous amounts of information just to whittle them back down to precisely the segments that are apt to perform best for each mailer.
Given that list owners are on the receiving end of marketers' list and data demands, let's take a look at the top requests crossing their desks these days.
The Big Slice and Dice
How can a marketer find more list opportunities, especially when it's run through the files in its particular category? Can list owners help more mailers test out-of-category—e.g., might there be an opportunity for an insurance company to rent subscriber lists for a publisher's fashion titles?
The answer lies in determining what data is important to different business sectors, then segmenting your file to make finding those pockets of names easier.
Companies Mentioned:
 |
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
