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.