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Red keyboard key labeled Data Management emphasizes the importance of data hygiene in maintaining organized and accurate information systems.

Understanding Data Hygiene

Data hygiene makes sure records in your mailing list are deliverable to responsive addresses by accomplishing two primary goals:

Making Sure Addresses are Deliverable: Nothing is more wasteful than paying to mail something that is undeliverable. Avoid doing this by completing at least the first two of the following steps before each new mailing:

Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) Certification: CASS Certification software improves the addresses on your mailing list by standardizing them, adding nine-digit zip codes, and creating delivery point barcodes for each address. CASS also converts old-style addresses like “Rural Route 1” to modern street names.
National Change of Address (NCOA): With about 11% of all Americans moving each year, keeping your direct mail list up-to-date is an ongoing challenge. Processing your list through NCOA updates all your records for which a Change of Address form has been submitted to the U.S. Postal Service with the correct forwarding address.
Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA): Unfortunately, as many as 40% of Americans who move don’t bother to file a Change of Address notice with the USPS. However, they usually do notify their cell phone company, cherished magazines, and other companies they don’t want to lose touch with. By comparing your list to a database of address changes maintained by a consortium of such companies, you can further improve your list’s deliverability.

Omitting Non-Responsive Addresses: There are a number of types of addresses that have far lower response rates than typical. For example, most businesses will find that mailings addressed to jails or prisons, military personnel, nursing homes, trailer parks or vacant lots are unlikely to generate much response. A thorough data hygiene process will remove these and other non-responsive address types from your list.

Want more information about how to use data hygiene to clean up your list? Download our free eBook How to Use Data Hygiene to Maximize Your Direct Mail’s ROI. And if you would prefer to have experts manage your list for you, please contact John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or by emailing john@mmidirect.com.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: data hygiene

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Should You Mail to Snowbirds?

In today’s mobile world, many people spend part of their year living in a different location than their primary home. The most common example of this is retirees who move south for the winter, but it also includes people splitting their time between multiple work locations and grandparents living for extended periods with different sets of grandchildren.

The U.S. Postal Service now lets you know if someone has provided them with a temporary forwarding address in their National Change of Address (NCOA) files. Does it make sense for you to mail to people who’ve temporarily moved?

The answer, like so many others in the data hygiene world, is “it depends”. These individuals might be some of your best donors, in which case reaching them would have a very positive impact on a mailing’s return. However, the reverse may also be true — maybe the last thing they’re going to consider when they’re sitting on the beach in Florida is the plight of the homeless in Maine. The only way to find out for sure is through testing.

We’ve had a variety of results when doing this research for our clients. One company had a very favorable response rate when they mailed to records whose mail date was more than 30 days from when the NCOA was run. Another found that their response rates for temporary moves was so low that it made no sense to include them in any future mailings.

If you’d like help maximizing the return on investment of your mailings from our data hygiene and merge purge experts, please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or let us know the best time to contact you.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: snowbirds, temporary moves

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Using Data Enhancement to Increase Response Rates

As your database has grown over the years, names have undoubtedly been added in a variety of ways. Perhaps one of your sales people picked up a business card at a convention or a memorial donation was made in honor of a friend. Unfortunately, a lot of the people in your database will never make another donation or buy your product. How do you separate the names that are worth continuing to contact from those that aren’t?

Enter data enhancement. Modeling organizations have built massive databases containing data on billions of transactions. One way you can take advantage of this treasure trove of information is to append useful data to your database, such as demographic information or email addresses, which would allow you to better personalize your marketing campaigns and possibly extend them across multiple channels.

You can also utilize the data in these powerful databases for predictive purposes. Modeling analyses can identify the factors that people donating to particular causes tend to have in common. These factors may include demographic characteristics such as age, sex, occupation, education or geographic location, but also may include product use patterns or a person’s interests. So, in addition to fleshing out the data in your database, a modeling company can analyze each record in your database and predict how likely this person is to respond to a mailing from you.

Modeling companies can take things even further. In addition to telling you which names are not likely to contribute, they can also recommend records to replace them with that are much more likely to be responsive to your appeal.

Data enhancement can be a powerful way to increase the response rate of your mailings. If you’d like help navigating this exciting area, please contact John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or ask us to contact you.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: data enhancement

Gingerbread figures lined up, symbolizing the concept of deduplication in data management to enhance ROI in marketing campaigns.

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Deduping a List to Maximize Your ROI

If you’re new to the merge purge world, the process of “deduping” may seem a bit mysterious. But once you understand a few basic principles, you can dedupe your lists with confidence.

The first thing to know is that when you’re trying to determine whether two records are duplicates, you can choose between three sets of matching criteria:

Individual: The first name, last name and address are the same in both records
Household: The last name and address match
Resident: The two records have the same address

Secondly, because misspellings and name variations are common, you need to specify how stringent your matching criteria should be. Fortunately, matching software does a good job taking common nicknames into account, and will mark “Bob” as equivalent to “Robert”. But after nicknames are taken into account, imagine giving each set of two records a score between 0 and 100 based on how similar the two entries are. If every character in the two records is identical, it would score a 100; if no character is the same, it gets a 0. You can then choose which of the following levels of matching you want to use based upon the two records’ matching score:

Exact: 100
Tight: 90 – 99
Medium: 75 – 89
Loose: 60 – 74

So let’s assume you are preparing to send an acquisition mailing to 100,000 prospects whose names you’ve rented because they’ve donated in the last year to at least one organization similar to yours.

The first thing you want to do is to cull out any duplicates so you don’t send more than one mailing to anyone on the list. If you want to limit mailings to one per family, you might choose to do so using a residential match with medium-tight match criteria.

Because these “multi-buyers” have given to more than one organization in your industry, they are likely to be among the best prospects on the list. And, depending upon your list rental agreements, you probably have the right to mail them a second time, so make sure to flag them accordingly.

In addition to checking for duplicates within the list, you will undoubtedly want to check this list against your house list. For example, if you are sending a solicitation designed to encourage low-dollar, first-time donations, you probably want to make sure that major donors who’ve given $5,000 or more to your organization not be sent the mailing. In fact, you probably don’t want anyone in their household to receive the mailing. Therefore, you should match the acquisition list against your Major Donor list using loose match criteria on a household or resident level.

Finally, you probably also want to remove any previous donors to your organization from the list. However, if a donor who gave $50 to the organization last month were to receive another solicitation, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Therefore, you may choose to match your recent, low-dollar donor file to the acquisition list using tight, individual match criteria.

Obviously, this is only the tip of the iceberg of how you can use merge purge to maximize the return on investment of your mailings. If you’d like to learn more, please download our free eBook, Optimizing Your Merge Purge Operations.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: deduping

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Are You Sure What the Flags in Your Database Mean?

If you’re like us, you’ve probably had the experience of wondering exactly what a flag in your database signifies. Was “Xmas15” meant to indicate that this person should be sent the December 2015 mailing, that they made a donation in response to that mailing, or that they’ve promised to make another major donation at this time and someone needs to call them?

Without a well-defined and documented set of database rules, flags have a tendency to sprout like weeds. While whoever added the flag undoubtedly knew exactly what it meant at the time, memories can become surprisingly fuzzy in only a few months.

As companies have moved away from having in-house database experts, the importance of up-to-date database documentation has grown. You should follow industry best practices by creating a database bible and updating it every time you add a new flag or make any other changes to the database.

As you flag records, one thing to avoid is being overly conservative. If someone tells you they want to receive less mail, flagging them as a “once/year donor” may be too restrictive. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t mark someone “do not mail” unless they adamantly tell you never to contact them again. “Do not mail” essentially eliminates the chance that you’ll ever receive another donation from this person again.

As an extreme example of this, one company was taking “do not email” to mean “do not mail”. Correcting this misunderstanding added 20,000 potential donors who had not been contacted in some time back into their mailing list!

As workloads get heavier and heavier, it is easy to convince yourself that there’s not enough time to document your database changes. Please resist this urge! Your future self will thank you immensely, as will the person who takes over your database responsibilities in the future.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: database flags

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How to Reactivate Lapsed Donors

According to the Association of Fundraising Professional’s 2016 Fundraising Effectiveness Survey of 9,922 nonprofits, only 46% of donors who contributed to a nonprofit in 2014 made a repeat gift in 2015. In other words, more than half of each organization’s donors from the previous year disappeared!

Since a marketing rule of thumb is that it costs 5 to 7 times more to acquire a new donor than to successfully resolicit an existing one, rekindling the interest of these donors should be a top priority of every nonprofit. The question is how to effectively do so.

The first thing to realize is that these donors probably don’t see themselves as having “lapsed”; they most likely still consider themselves active supporters of your organization. Celebrate their past giving and rekindle their passion for your cause by sharing stories of how their gifts made a big difference. Creating a compelling, donor-focused newsletter or video that tells stories about how your organization helped specific individuals or communities can be highly effective in accomplishing this.

If your lapsed donors contributed to a specific campaign, make sure your reactivation piece includes stories about the impact your organization is making in areas you know they’re interested in. For example, if someone donated to help hurricane victims in Haiti, tell stories about the home your organization built for a young family and about the well you dug which brought clean water to a town. If you’re helping with the aftermath of a similar tragedy somewhere else today, you can then segue to describing your current needs.

It is important to realize that lapsed donors can be quite different. Some will have given once and never again; others may have given faithfully for many years. You will be most successful if you approach these groups differently in your reactivation efforts.

The Audubon Society of Rhode Island created a very interesting campaign for long-time donors who had recently let their membership lapse. Rather than berate them for not continuing to contribute, Audubon thanked them for their many years of support with a handwritten, personalized note, described the impact their previous donations had had, and extended their membership for free for another year. Amazingly, 50% responded to this non-appeal by paying for their annual membership and 25% actually donated more than the annual fee!

One group worthy of extra attention is lapsed donors who are still actively contributing to similar organizations. Identify these high-potential lapsed donors by running a merge purge operation that compares your lapsed files to acquisition lists you’re renting. Then reach out to each of these individuals in a carefully-considered, personalized way.

Developing an effective reactivation program can be time-consuming. Done well, however, you’re sure to find that the returns make it very worthwhile.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: lapsed donors

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Optimizing Your Ask String

One of the most crucial elements of an effective solicitation letter is to ask for a donation of the right size. If a donor has given $100 to you twice before, you are leaving cash on the table if you suggest a donation of $25. Alternatively, if a donor never gives more than $15 to any organization, you shouldn’t ask them for “$100, $50 or $25”, as you are likely to receive nothing.

It is typically recommended that the lowest suggestion on your ask string match the largest donation this donor has made in the past, rounding up slightly if necessary to reach a common donation amount. This low ask should be preceded by two higher asks featuring amounts that are significantly higher but not unreasonable for this level of donor.

Choosing the appropriate ask string for records on your house list tends to be straightforward, as you can base your request on what that individual has given you in the past. For records on acquisition lists, however, you’re flying blind because you have no giving history.

A solution you may want to consider is to work with a modeling organization. Because they have massive databases containing billions of records, they can recommend an appropriate ask string for most individuals based upon their donations to similar organizations.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: ask string

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Optimizing Your Merge Purge Operations

Organizations looking to expand their customer or donor base will often rent lists of recent donors or customers from similar organizations. Prior to sending a direct mail solicitation to these prospects, it is important to clean up these lists by eliminating duplicate names and suppressing the records of people who are already on your house list or to whom you don’t want to mail for another reason. The direct mail industry refers to this process as “merge purge”.

While the concepts behind merge purge are simple, executing a well-designed merge purge campaign can be surprisingly complicated. We’ve created an eBook titled “Optimizing Your Merge Purge Operations” to demystify the actions you should take. Download this free 22-page eBook by clicking on the picture below:

The eBook begins by outlining what you should take into account as you choose match criteria to dedupe your list. For each set of duplicates you find, the eBook explains how to select the best record to keep.

Once you have a deduped list, there are several exciting options you should consider, such as marketing again to multi-buyers or using modeling to further optimize the records on your list and choose the best ask strings. After explaining how to do each of these options, the eBook concludes by describing how to read the reports you get from your merge purge software or consultants.

If you’re new to the field or would find a refresher on merge purge processes helpful, please download this free eBook now.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Cultivating Direct Mail Multi-Buyers

In the search for new donors, direct mailers often rent lists of people who have donated to similar organizations. Names that appear on more than one acquisition list are called Multi-Buyers.

Because these individuals have contributed to multiple organizations, multi-buyers tend to perform better than those who appear on only one acquisition list. Therefore, you should give special thought to how best to cultivate these individuals.

If you’re working with a modeling organization, you can take advantage of their massive database to identify the optimum ask string for each person. Since donors have a tendency to continue donating at a given level, you should aim for a first donation that is towards the higher end of what this person’s giving history indicates they’re comfortable donating.

One of the magical things about multi-buyers is that, depending upon your pricing arrangement with the list owners, you may already own the right to contact them again. For example, if you’ve paid for all non-suppressed names on each list and you have a record that occurred on two different lists, you’ve paid for this 2-time multi-buyer twice. As a result, you have the right to mail them a second time. Similarly, you can send a third mailing to a 3-time multi-buyer who appears on three of your acquisition lists.

For these additional mailings, you might want to address a second mailing to a different member of the household. For example, if John Smith and Mary Smith appear on multiple acquisition lists at the same address, you might choose to send the second mailing to the spouse of the person you mailed the first solicitation to.

Want some help cultivating your multi-buyers? Our experts have been optimizing direct mail lists for decades, and we’d love to tackle yours. Please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or let us know when you would like us to call you.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Choosing the Best Merge Purge Record to Keep

A question that arises when you’re testing different acquisition lists is how to choose which record to keep when a potential donor’s name appears on two different lists. Like many other issues related to list management, this type of decision can be surprisingly complicated!

Of course, if one of the records is on your house list, it’s rare that you wouldn’t keep the house record. Why pay to acquire a name that you already own and have a history with?

However, if the same name appears on two different acquisition lists, you and your List Broker have several options for setting ranking priorities: merge purge

Rank Lists By Order of Cost: If names on one list cost $40/thousand and the other list costs $100/thousand, it makes sense to choose the name on the less expensive list as long as your list agreements don’t prohibit this type of ranking priority.

Rank Test Lists Higher: If this is the first time you are using a particular list, you might want to give names on it a higher priority than your continuation list in order to give the new list the best chance of proving its worth.

Rank Test Lists Lower: Alternatively, if you’re primarily interested in tapping into a new universe of names (and assuming your list rental agreements don’t prohibit this), you might rank a new list lower than your continuation list in order to determine whether mailing to its incremental, unique new names is worthwhile.

Random Selection: Finally, if you want a clean read on the responsiveness of the names on different lists, you can randomly decide which names to keep.

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, we’d love to help. Our team of experts has been eating, breathing & dreaming about list optimization for decades! Please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or tell us when you’d like us to contact you.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

MMI News

Understanding Data Hygiene

Should You Mail to Snowbirds?

Using Data Enhancement to Increase Response Rates

Deduping a List to Maximize Your ROI

Are You Sure What the Flags in Your Database Mean?

How to Reactivate Lapsed Donors

Optimizing Your Ask String

Optimizing Your Merge Purge Operations

Cultivating Direct Mail Multi-Buyers

Choosing the Best Merge Purge Record to Keep

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