Teaching Old Names New Tricks

FOR CATALOGERS, RFM (recency, frequency and monetary) analysis is still a powerful list prospecting and continuation mailing tool. But catalogers are also turning to other criteria, such as customer modeling and profiling-and cooperative databases, allowing for a larger pool of potential customers. Additionally, co-op database managers can add value to a file through overlays and analysis.

A fair question is whether such a system would work for magazine subscriptions in the same way. Emap Petersen Publishing Inc. seems to think so, and is using Experian Direct Tech’s CircBase, a publishing co-op database, to prove it.

For the former Petersen Cos. Inc.-which began to embrace direct mail only three years ago (before last December’s merger between Emap plc and Petersen resulted in the new company name)-CircBase was instrumental in helping to attract readers in an era of dwindling newsstand sales.

All of Emap Petersen’s subscription-driven titles-consisting mainly of automotive and outdoors (sport and hunting) publications, with the odd computing and audiophile title tossed in-participate in CircBase. Such magazines tend to serve a focused niche, and appropriate prospect names often are hard to find.

Emap Petersen has been using CircBase’s prospecting file for a dozen or so magazines during its last three new-subscriber mailings. The lists, says group circulation director Leonard Weed, have been indexing higher than 100-that is, above the standard response rate for the various segments mailed-for most of the publications. Some of the more vertical titles are doing even better.

CircBase, which has links to another Experian Direct Tech product, the Z-24 catalog database, has proven useful in a different publishing circulation area: expires renewals. Rather than just segmenting and marketing to chunks of an expires file based on time (i.e., all non-renewers within a six-month period from three years prior), CircBase can index an expires list against the file of catalog buyers. Recent mail order purchasers can be given higher weights; such a step serves as a further check of NCOA merge/purge activity.

In using this function, Emap Petersen has made the performance of its expires lists comparable to those of hotline lists. For one title, Skin Diver, an expires mailing indexed at 116. Not bad, but not remarkable, until a “cash with order” response rate of higher than 75% is factored in.

Using a modeling process can be daunting to magazine circulation managers, says Weed: “If there is a hard thing to do in selling database marketing to magazine DMers, it is keeping the faith through the initial mailings and the creation of the response models.” Most circulation directors, he feels, go from campaign to campaign with the philosophy of “Next time I’ll get this list and others like it.”

But choosing to use a co-op has provided benefits beyond generating or renewing subscriptions.

One of Emap Petersen’s advertisers sells skating and skateboarding equipment and related apparel. The marketer had been buying lists from some of the company’s more vertical publications, such as Inline. Through use of affinity data from Z-24, Emap Petersen was able to provide the marketer with lists of subscribers to other Emap Petersen titles with an affinity for his products.

Weed wasn’t worried that advocating direct mail would fuel the firm’s list rental income by taking away from display advertising. One advertiser claimed its display ads weren’t generating any response. Using the magazine co-op file, the advertiser was given a mailing list that brought about a better-than-expected response. The advertiser has continued its presence in the magazine, while changing the focus from brand building to direct response.

To some extent, CircBase has not yet reached its full potential. When Great Universal Stores, Experian Direct Tech’s parent company, bought Metromail in 1998, Metromail’s BehaviorBank was part of the purchase. Experian is currently adding BehaviorBank’s psychographic data to the CircBase file.

“Right now, we have about 100 demographic elements overlaid [on the file],” says Experian Direct Tech vice president of information services Christopher M. Lynde. When BehaviorBank data is added, Experian Direct Tech will add close to the same number of lifestyle elements.

Overmarketing? One of the charges leveled at co-op databases is the possibility of overmarketing to the hottest prospect names, such as multibuyers.

Lynde discounts this: “The names are at play in the industry. The feeling that we own our files lock, stock and barrel [is waning].” He believes that a single name could reside on as many as 200 files.

The CircBase project has been in development for more than two years. Initially it served as a data-append program, linking subscriber files with the Z-24 database. This allowed magazine circulation directors access to a source of affinity names. But, as Lynde points out, it also gave them the ability to pitch subscriber lists to catalogers based on appending RFM data from a specific catalog to a subscriber, thereby demonstrating reader affinity. The system was fully configured last May, allowing prospecting across multiple publications.