October 2011 Newsletter

Mailing Lists

We are quickly approaching the holiday season, which generally means that mailing season is upon us. Whether it is a catalog, a targeted campaign to reward your top customers, or invitations to a special event, you will need to send out mail. In some cases email will be the preferred delivery method, in other cases it will be postal mail.

Clean Up

The first step in a successful mailing is often to ensure your list is clean. Sending mail to old or incomplete addresses is neither efficient or effective. Even small touches such as making sure names and addresses are properly spelled and capitalized will create a more professional looking mail campaign, and will enhance deliverability rates (and therefore response rates!).

The best method to clean up your customer data is to divide your customer list between employees and have them manually go through and clean up customer profiles. Simple phone number and address checks can often be accomplished using 411.com or a similar equivalent. Whether you break it up based on assigned customers, handing out pages of a customer report, or by letters of the alphabet, any cleanup that can be accomplished within Executive will pay dividends for future mailings as well, which is the main advantage over just cleaning up your exported Excel file before mailing. It's often best to do this during a slow period where employees are looking for more things to do, and you can even add some competition by awarding a prize to the person who looks up the largest number of customers.

Choosing your Customer List

Now that your customer data is cleaned up, it's time to choose your mail recipients. If you plan to send to your entire customer base, you can simply export your Customer List report. By using the filters in a report, you can also narrow down your customer base to target a specific subset.

Common mailing campaigns can include:

• Customers of a certain Level (A, B, C, etc)
• Customers from a specific region (only those who are local, or within the state)
• Customers of a specific gender (for a Ladies Night event)

Each of the above lists can be produced using the Customer report and the appropriate filters.

If you would like to choose your mailing list based on past purchasing behaviour, the Top Customer report is a very powerful option. You can choose how many Top customers you want based on the selected filters, or just fill in a large number so that all customers matching the criteria are shown.

Common Top Customer campaigns include:

• Anyone who has made a purchase in a certain time frame (the last 6 months, year, etc)
• Anyone with total Sales between $ and $ (leave the To field blank if you do not want a maximum limit)
• Anyone who has made a purchase from a specific department/category/group/supplier (for special events or targeted sales)

As with the regular Customer report, any combination of these filters can be used to get the exact customer list you want.

Exporting to Excel

Once you have narrowed down your list, it is time to export it. This can be done easily by choosing the Export to Text file option on your chosen report.

Please see Exporting Reports for steps on how this is done.

Mailing

Once you have your customers in Excel, further cleanup will likely be required. Remove any customers with insufficient information, or fill it in if it is known.

Depending on your campaign, different final steps may be needed. For a catalog mailing, you could just print your mailing labels and begin stuffing envelopes. If you are doing personalized invitations, you may need to do a mail merge in Word to create your customized letters. For an email list, you may be importing your list into an Automated Marketing System such as Act-On or Constant Contact.

Whatever your final delivery method, targeting the correct customers using clean data will help improve your response rates, and in turn, improve your margin returns on mailing campaigns!