This case study touches on mailing list management — what it is, how to do it and why it’s important to your business. As you’ll read below, the results of practicing smart list management on your mailing list can be the difference between success and failure for some marketers. It may not always be easy, but by reading on you’re already taking a step in the right direction to increased revenue, reduced costs and overall profitability.

About the Customer

Setting the standard for classic American style, this company is recognized worldwide as a symbol of American heritage. Since 1863, six generations of family ownership began when a young English weaver came to Oregon. The retailer owns and operates some of America’s oldest woolen mills, constantly updating them with state-of-the-art looms and eco-friendly technology. Products are offered in catalogs, online and in retail and outlet stores throughout the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.

The Challenge

This company has relied heavily on a catalog as part of their omni-channel marketing approach. Despite the usual success of their campaign, they were slowly starting to see their profit margin diminishing due to the increase in postage rates and fees associated with undeliverable catalogs. The issue of recency was playing a major factor in the integrity of their mailing list. Arandell’s data analysts got to work by analyzing and crunching numbers to discover the root of their problems.

The Solution

Arandell’s focus was to help this client deliver catalogs to the intended customer at the lowest price point possible. We introduced this retailer to our Retail Advantage™ solution, which incorporates a full suite of address integrity solutions, duplication logic and 400+ consumer and business data points. This required Arandell to improve the accuracy with which catalogs were being delivered as well as eliminate additive costs for undeliverable addresses. By utilizing Arandell’s extensive proprietary suite of address software, we were able to drastically reduce the number of undeliverable catalogs. Together, we explored new ways to enhance the mailing file to ensure successful delivery.

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Overall Impact

• Through the analysis we identified that over 8% of the mail file contained data that was inaccurate, undeliverable, outdated or duplicated
• Using this process, we lowered their cost per piece by 7%
• We better defined their customer and target audience through our profiling capability which lead to better list selections
• The updated, corrected file was used in the next mailing and the response rates were 6% higher than previous
• Total sales from the mailing was 14% higher than previous
• Over the course of a year, Arandell managed to save the client $246,913.49