I want to merge-purge multiple mailing lists...
1) Situation...
Scenario 1: Company X sells holidays and leisure breaks online. It wants to launch an email campaign to promote its low-cost holidays to people who have requested additional information but have not yet made a purchase. The company also wants to expand its universe of potential customers by renting several lists that target individuals who have made online purchases of leisure products in the last 12-18 months.
Realising that the chances for duplicates among the lists are very high, the company asks the various list owners for permission to merge the lists and purge those duplicates to avoid upsetting recipients. Some recipients have just purchased products and may be annoyed by missing the chance to take advantage of the discount included in the email offer; other people may appear on two or more of the lists and would therefore receive the offer multiple times. Company X also would like to identify those individuals who appear on multiple lists so it can undertake a special separating mailing targeting them as highly motivated buyers.
However, the list rental companies refuse this request as they would have to give up control of their lists and would possibly violate privacy policies the individuals on those lists understood to be in place at the time they opted in (assuming that the lists in question are opt-in lists).
But Company X wants to avoid spam - which would be the result of sending duplicate messages to those individuals who appear on multiple lists (not to mention the alienation of what could be very, very motivated buyers based on past purchasing patterns). The company wants to maximise the results of its email campaign by targeting messages based on purchasing behaviours by not emailing to current customers and duplicate addresses.
Scenario 2: Company Z sells communication
products, both direct and through retail outlets. It wants to acquire
new customers and enrich the information it already holds on its customer
base. It has decided to purchase a number of new mailing lists from multiple
sources and undertake a direct mail campaign to a mix of its customer base,
the new lists and to local prospect lists supplied by each of their retail
outlets.
After agreeing to purchase the lists on a net names basis, where the list brokers are informed of the actual number of names used from each of the lists, Company Z is faced with the problem of how best to determine the overlap across lists and also how best to suppress their existing customer base.
In addition:
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lists vary in terms of content and format
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the purchased lists vary in cost so a priority needs to be set that where duplicates across lists exist, the records from the lowest cost list are chosen
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they suspect that some of the lists are not too clean and within themselves have duplicates
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some of the lists are more up-to-date than others and could contain conflicting information such as telephone numbers
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some lists hold additional information such as purchase history which needs to be consolidated against their existing customers and new prospects to enrich their profile
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where duplicate records are found across multiple lists, then the output record needs to have source codes stored against for every list from where there is a match
What started off as a fairly straightforward task now seems more complex. Indeed the process can be heavy going with a need to reformat and standardise all incoming data, match it using different priorities, gather information across duplicates and store it in consolidated records, accurately report output record counts back to each list broker, and add information to the customer base.
Tech4T have the solution to both these scenarios!
