ITW Publishing

If only it were so easy as to put 100,000 pieces in the mail and you got 1,000 responses, which totaled $35,000 in purchases. The cost of the printing and postage was a total of $10,000. The cost of mail list rentals was $5,000. So that the response was 1% generated purchases and the profit was $20,000. This is a success, yes? Well, maybe. Without examining the list of lists, with all costs associated, and analyzing WHERE the response was generated, you only have a partial answer. You still don't know how each list, including all housefile segments and multies performed. With additional information, you could make judgments about upcoming mailings and which lists actually produced dollars... and which ones were completely or nearly non-productive. For a revealing analysis of the campaign and of the response, the following documents should be examined:

• The list of lists and associated key codes, including all housefile segments, 0-12 month buyers and any older customers which were mailed, and the cost per thousand of each key coded rented lists.
• Merge Report from the Service bureau. This should be used to identify multies, uniques and non-deliverables.
• Mail Tape with all key codes.
• The Merge/Purge priorities and strategies used to determine order of suppression, assignment of multies need to be accounted for in analyzing the response rates. For example, because housefiles have no rental costs associated, they are always cheaper than rented lists. Since the houseflies are suppressed, how many housefile names were suppressed from each rented list. This is just as important as knowing where the multies occurred.
• The List of list Report should then be generated that has comparisons of number and percentage of total mailed, containing duplicates with housefile names, multies, uniques and non-deliverables.
• Response tape, including Name/complete address, key code associated with source, and dollar amount of purchase. If there was a soft offer as part of the mailer, the number of responses (non-purchase response) should also be tracked.
• With all of the above documents, a complete response analysis can then be done. This analysis can be used for:
• Allocation of profit
• Identification of most productive in the mail lists
• Identification of where it is worth negotiating a net arrangement due to high overlap with housefile.
• Identification of average order per list segment, including housefiles.
• Spotting where merge/purge strategies could be tested. The lowest cost lists, where possible, should go first into the merge.
• Mapping of geographical distribution of response to look for geographical bias, and thus include geographical selects to maximize probability of response.
• Opportunity to add business intelligence to mailing decisions