Labor Day is behind us, which means that most mailers are gearing up for the Holiday season. If you’re a B2B mailer and are seeing a decline in results with your older buyer file, try testing a title slug in place of the individual name on the record. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker spends 4.5 years at a job. For B2B mailers, this can be a problem when sending a book to a site that has not purchased in over four years, because the book is most likely going to the person that is no longer with the company or has moved up the corporate ladder and is no longer the active buyer at that site. In order to reactivate an older site, we recommend removing the individual name and replacing it with an appropriate title slug to help get the book into the correct hands at that particular business. You can even test the incremental lift on this by splitting up the circulation to your older buyers and send half the books with the individual name included and the other half with the name replaced with an appropriate title slug. Replacing the name with a title slug will ensure that the book gets delivered to the “Office Manager” rather than John Smith, who used to be the office manager two years ago.
Another reason why reactivation is so important is because for many B2B mailers, it can be difficult to grow their business via prospecting because there is a limited universe of sites for that particular mailer. For example, if you sell medical supplies, you may already have 95% of the available hospitals or clinics in the United States on your buyer file and prospect to the remaining 5%. To sum it up, your universe of potential sites to mail to is limited. So by reactivating older sites by replacing the individual name with a title slug, this can help grow your 12 month buyer file by ensuring the catalog gets into the hands of the correct individual at that site.
Also, during the Holiday season, prospecting circulation can make up a large portion of a mailer’s overall circulation. So, by title slugging older sites, you can save on marketing costs by replacing some of your prospecting circulation with buyer reactivation circulation. Chances are the reactivation of your older buyer file will outperform the prospecting lists brought in for the Holiday season.