Channel | ROI | Metrics

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Thanks to reduced prospecting and catalog circulation, many mailers are finding they have fewer housefile names to leverage, and less new names on the rental market. How can you improve your list's performance, and get profitably back in the mail? Here's a few tips.

Statistical prospecting models don’t have to be confusing to direct mailers. If you know about two main types of acquisition models, you can boost your business far beyond the "mail-to-everyone-all-the-time" approach to finding new customers. You don’t even have to know how to create models. Just know what to ask for when you want them.

A marketing database must be able to perform all of the mission-critical analytical tasks required for data-driven marketing. Many people think they have a marketing database when, in reality, what they have is an operational database. An operational database supports essential "nuts and bolts" tasks such as customer service, fulfillment and inventory management. But, it…

Recency/frequency/monetary value modeling, or RFM, is a tried-and-true segmentation tactic for catalogers and other mail order marketers. But e-mail practitioners have been more reluctant to use it to segment their campaigns.

Sure, times are tough, money is tight and uncertainty is the mood of the moment. While a mailer's first reaction might be to cut, cut, cut, it is also time for some reflection. Are you making the best possible use of your expires?

Finding good, affordable, responsive lists seems to be getting harder and harder every day

Want to get fired by your CEO? Measure the wrong stuff and present him or her with the results. All too many marketers are doing that these days. If you

Want to drive higher responses and find a wealth of viable prospects in your database? You'll have to brave a bit of math. That is, you must segment your file and apply predictive models to it. And that's a complex task. Above all, you have to know what models can and can't do.

A Minnesota man pleaded guilty in federal court to selling pirated movies on the Internet, the Associated Press reported. This is the first federal prosecution