Lexmark 720, 110 manual Will the Need for a Long-term View Thwart Adoption?

Response Rates: Personalized vs.

Conventional Mailings

15.5%

Returned contract rate

Telephone inquiry rate

6.3%

5.4%

2.4%

Pieces	Personalized	Conventional
mailed:	670	748

Source: IIW Institute of Information

Management (www.iiw.de)

contact contribute to the database with accurate information, ìas-you-goî database updating may be insufficient for some applications. An assumption about a database is that the information categories, are, to a great extent, predefined. With the exception of information that is mandatory, each field will have an ìincompletionî rate, since not all customers will have information in all categories. When the fields do contain information, one has to determine whether the information is up to date. Therefore, for a given marketing application, one needs to ascertain if the database has the required information in the first place, and if the information is complete enough and current enough. For Stradtwerke Dusseldorf AGís one-to-one marketing campaign, the utilityís call center had to verify all addresses and industry classifications. In addition, the utilityís customer databases, which had been developed and maintained for accounting purposes, had to be converted to suit marketing purposes. (The summary report provides no details about the need for this conversion or the nature of the change.) Based on the experience with Stradtwerke Dusseldorf AG, the report concludes, ìÖit can be said in retrospect that the establishment of an infrastructure (verification of

Telephone Inquiry Conversion Rates

64.3%

61.1%

Personalized		Conventional
Number
of inquiries:	42	18

Source: IIW Institute of Information

Management (www.iiw.de)

customer addresses, establishment of a customer database procurement, selection and preparation of content, establishment of customer data record/content links) does not pay off in just one project.î

The more creative one gets about linking customer information with customer communication, the more chance one has of needing to collect or update information in order to launch the campaign. That being said, once a company starts to use one-to-one marketing, a new relationship between an organizationís customer database and the companyís communications efforts will be established. No doubt marketing planners will become skilled at using the ìstandardî set of data, and will learn how to anticipate the need for enhanced or additional data.

Will the Need for a Long-term View Thwart Adoption?

In practice, most promotional campaigns are indeed asked to stand for themselves in ìjust one project.î One wants to foster creative ways of communicating, but when the sales motive is behind the effort, the expectation is that the mailing will make a profit. In

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March 2001 Page 17