Spectrum Cable & Discover Bank: Know Thy Customer

Preparing an acquisitions direct mail acquisitions campaign mailing list takes time -- sometimes, a lot of it. Typically, a preliminary list needs to be pulled from an external database, checked against one (or several) internal databases, and sent to a lettershop. Depending on the state of your business’s files and how antiquated your systems are, this process can easily take a month. After receiving your mailing list, the lettershop typically needs three to five business days to personalize your mailing, prepare it for mailing per postal service guidelines, and get it in the mail. Once a large-scale Standard Rate mailing is in the mail, it can take the USPS about a week to deliver it.

That’s about six weeks to execute an acquisitions direct mail campaign -- not including creatively developing and printing the mail, which can hopefully be a concurrent step. Nor does it include planning the mailing, determining costs, getting cost approval from management (or, if you run the business, ensuring you have the money to spend), training people at the inbound call center and customer service to react to customer responses, preparing the website for online responses, and setting up the business’s internal procedures to process sales to new customers. Whew! 

While you are soliciting new customers, you might take efforts to make existing customers more profitable. This means differentiating your prospective customers from your existing customers. Understanding who your own customers are, from your own internal database, is something I call “Small Data.” This is where Spectrum and Discover merit a Fail for Targeting.

In December, I was already a Spectrum customer for high-speed internet when I received a self-mailer offering a cable TV package. That was a valid attempt at upsell. However, on the same day, I received a nearly identical-looking self-mailer offering a high-speed internet and cable TV bundle. The upsell mailer was addressed to me, while the acquisitions mailer was addressed to “Current Resident” with a salutation of “Dear Neighbor.”

Given that I received both self-mailers on the same day, I presume they both had been mailed from the same lettershop with separate mailing list files released to the lettershop on the same day. Spectrum could have (during their weeks of preparing the mailing lists) deduped actual customers from the prospect file; however, they obviously did not. Perhaps this was a timing issue -- but I’d signed up for Spectrum Cable in early October. Even a company as large as Spectrum should be able to run a customer check given that much lead time.

Spectrum Cable Self-Mailers
Address Panels

Spectrum self-mailers envelope back

Upsell roll-out panel & letter

Acquisitions roll-out panel & letter

Also in December, I received a pair of solo mail packages with similar offers -- one designed for upsell and one for acquisitions. 

Spectrum Solo Mail
Outer Envelopes

Upsell Letter

These two packages demonstrate non-optimized list hygiene.    

With Spectrum, there could have been an internal issue related to timing of removing new customers from prospect lists; however, the same can’t be said for Discover Online Savings Bank. I recently received a self-mailer addressed to me, inviting me to open a new online savings account. Nice creative, but I opened the type of account with Discover Bank in 2018.

Discover Bank
Address panel

Back panel

Inside panels

A business needs to value its customers by not confusing them with prospective customers. Or to paraphrase Hamlet, “To thine own customer be true.”

Lesson: 

Remove customers from your prospect mailing lists on a timely basis.

Fiddler on the Roof: Don’t Fall – Dedup Your List

Selling tickets for an off-Broadway show is challenging. That’s why someone in charge of marketing and advertising a show often uses a mix of communication channels — television advertising, spot radio, ticket outlets like TKTS and TodayTix, and handing out flyers around Times Square.

Plus, direct mail. Why the multi-channel mix? One word: Tradition!

Self-Mailer front

Which brings me to this Fail for Targeting. A neighbor received two identical self-mailers for the new off-Broadway Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof on the same day. One self-mailer included her full name, including middle name, while the other included only her first and last name. However, both self-mailers have the same last name, apartment number, street address, and complete zip+4.

Inside panels

In the past, when the recipient had purchased Broadway tickets, she typically used her full name. Sometimes, however, she used only her first and last name. That’s probably why she received these two mailers—the marketing people for Fiddler on the Roof had rented different lists of people who are likely to purchase show tickets, merged them, and targeted them for a bulk mailing. The mistake here is in list hygiene — specifically, making sure your mailing list is clean but not duplicative.

Address side

Perhaps the mailing list manager had made a decision to allow for multiple people in the same home to receive the same mailer. Typically, that’s a cost-inefficient approach; however, the manager may have assumed that, if one person in the home turns out to be uninterested in the show, the other person might be. Even if that were the case, though, the first and last names on these mailers were identical. That indicates that both names are of the same person.

2 self-mailers to the same name & address

Executing a successful direct mail campaign as part of an omnichannel marketing mix involves understanding the dynamics of the channel. It is a balance of Targeting, Offer, Creative, and Timing. Having the right balance isn’t easy — but, then again, neither is being a Fiddler on the Roof.

Lesson: Practice proper list hygiene by removing duplicate names from your mailing and limiting your targeting to one mailer per address.