Of windows and frequency in mailing and remailing.

I've been thinking about mailing (and remailing) dates. Is it really important that you require or ask the list owner or manager to give your mailing a clear window during which that list won't be available to competitive mailers?

Direct marketing expert Craig Huey answers that question with a firm affirmative:

"Reserve your mail date," he says. His thinking is that the very best mailing lists require a reserved mail date. Beware any list that doesn't! Huey says that it could mean other mailers have had poor results and so no one uses the list, or it may mean the list owner is not protecting your mail date. Other mailers could mail at the same time, decreasing your response. A good list, Huey points out, has many users, but the owner should not let anyone mail for one week on either side of your mailing.

On the other hand

But I tend to agree with Bill Bonner of Agora Publishing, one of the more aggressive marketers in the newsletter business, who says he could never see the point in insisting on this "window."

Even if your printer and mail house are as efficient as we'd all like them to be, with the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service you can't control when the mailing is actually going to reach the prospect's inbox.

Should you worry about competitive offers?

How much should you worry about "competitive offers"? You can ask the owners of List A not to rent to any of your competitors during the "window," but how effective is that? There are peak times for direct mail campaigns, post-Christmas, Labor Day, etc. The folks on List A, probably good direct mail buyers, are going to be getting a lot of mail from various sources even if the owner of one list they are on agrees not to rent them at that time.

Llewellyn King of The Energy Daily says, "The only time you'd ever worry about 'competitiion' is in the unlikely event of your mail and your competitor's arriving on a prospect's desk at the exact same day." How likely is that?

My old boss Ken Callaway of Capitol Publications used to explain his willingness to exchange lists with direct competitors by saying, "I figure there are a certain number of yokels out there who will buy everything they are offered and there's no reason why both of us shouldn't have them."

But, when I was publishing Fred Goss' What's Working in Direct Marketing, my list rental requests were frequently turned down for "competitive reasons." Does anyone really believe many people were going to stop reading Denny Hatch's Who's Mailing What or subscribing to Direct Marketing Magazine and take only my newsletter? My ego would never go that far.

Newsletter buyers are information seekers. They are much more likely to decide to read two publications than to drop one.

I did renewal marketing for The Newsletter on Newsletters for a couple of years, and over that time I heard all the "typical" explanations from expires: "Our budget has been slashed." "We aren't in that business anymore." "The person who subscribed is no longer here."

But less than one percent of the "No, thank you's" ever said, "We get everything we need from NEPA's Hotline, so we decided we didn't need NL/NL any longer." Less than one percent.

Frequency

Mail more often. "If you don't send mail, you don't get orders," a colleague used to say.

Most aggressive newsletter publishers mail three or even four times to their best lists (the increased use of forced free trials has probably cut the average as you can usually only FFT once annually).

If the response to your post-holiday drop was good, why wait until April or May to mail again? Copywriter Rene Gnam says if you remail six weeks after the first drop (about as fast as you can do half-life analysis and reprint and mail), you'll get 65 percent of the response to the first mailing.

Consider it. Anytime you get response of over $1.50 per $1.00 spent--if Rene is correct--an "immediate remail" would break even. Most newsletter marketers are willing to accept that. And, the metaphysics of newsletter marketing holds that "orders you don't get today are gone forever; they aren't replaced by orders you get later from subsequent mailings."

That should be worth a test.