GLOSSARY OF DIRECT MARKETING TERMS By Arthur Middleton Hughes Affinity Appended Data People who are similar in lifestyle process whereby a customer file has Abandonment data appended to it (such as age, As in the phrase “call abandonment”. Affinity Analysis income, home value) from some This refers to people who, being A process of finding relationships external data file. See overlay. placed on hold in an incoming call, between customer purchases. People elect to hang up (“abandon”) the who buy skis buy snow tires. ASCII call. Call centers monitor closely the American Standard format for data “abandonment rate” as a measure of Affinity Matrix storage on magnetic media (tape or their inefficiency. A cross tab showing cross buying disk). patterns by customers who did or did ACD not buy Products A, B, C, and D. Attrition Model Automatic Call Distributor. A complex A model that predicts which machine used in modern call centers Affluents customers are most likely to leave. for incoming calls. It routes calls to Households with 30% or more than Usually expressed as a percentage of available agents, holds overflow calls, the cost of living plus taxes. likelihood. gives and takes messages, provides reports. A must for modern database Agent Attrition Rate marketing. The word for a telephone operator The opposite of retention rate. The in a modern inbound call center in a percentage of customers this year who Acquisition Cost company that takes a lot of customer are no longer buying next year. The cost of signing up a new service and sales calls. customer. Lifetime Value is often used Autosexing to compute the maximum allowable Analog A computer process for finding the sex acquisition cost. Regular telephone service comes and appending titles (Mr. Ms.) to a file over analog lines. Modern improved of names. Address service (often used for data lines) A computer term for the location comes over DIGITAL lines in which all Back end on a disk or in memory of a piece the sounds are converted to 1’s and As in phrase “back end analysis” refers of information. Addresses help the 0’s. For database marketing computer to the results of actions with people computer to find things rapidly, and to communications, digital is better. who have responded to your initial store them for later retrieval. offer. ANI Ad-hoc report Automatic Number Identification. A Batch mode A reporting method which permits system whereby you can learn the If you have received 10,000 replies to you to ask questions like: How many number of a person who is calling you a mailing, you can update your master women over 60 have bought more on the telephone. Can be linked to a file with these replies in one batch. than $200 from us in the last 4 database to find the person’s name This is the fastest and cheapest way months? and address. to update records. The opposite is On- Line updating. 2495 Main Street • Suite 220 • Buffalo, NY 14214 716 332 4369 • [email protected] • www.marketingtechonline.com DESIGN IT. WRITE IT. PRINT IT. MAIL IT. PERSONALIZE IT. DEVELOP IT. AUTOMATE IT. MARKETING TECH DOES IT! Baud rate Bugs Cheshire Label A measure of line transmission speed. Errors that crop up in software. A type of plain paper label used in 28.8 thousand Baud is a good speed Caused by inability of programmers mailing. Requires a Cheshire machine for terminals and PC’s connected to a to predict all possible ways that the to affix to mailing material. The most marketing database. Speeds can go up code in their programs will be used to common computer label. to 56,000 or more. process data. Chip Bits Byte The thing in the center of a computer If a byte is like an atom in computer A unit of computer memory. One that makes it work. On a PC a 486 language, a bit is like an electron. A bit letter or number is a byte. A byte is chip is a fast chip. A Pentium is is either on or off. It is either a 1 or a usually composed of eight bits. faster. Faster and faster chips keep zero. Eight bits make up one byte. coming out. Chips are the size of your Call center fingernail, and hold millions of circuits Block The word for an inbound telephone shrunk by photographic methods to The smallest reported unit in the 1990 division in a company. The operators tiny size. U.S. Census. About 14 households in are called Agents. The call center uses a block. an ACD (automatic call distributor) to Churning manage the calls efficiently. The practice of customers switching Block group to another supplier based on special The smallest reported unit in the 1980 Call Tracking discount offers. Particularly used in U. S. Census. About 340 households Keeping track of what happened to the cellular telephone or credit card on average. customer calls. industries. Bounce back CD CIF The practice of sending another A banking term for certificate of Customer Information File usually identical (or similar) catalog back deposit. Also: a compact disk, a form in banks and financial institutions. to someone who has just ordered of digitized data storage. (as in CD- A consolidation of many different something from one of your catalogs. ROM) accounts held by a household or individual, used for marketing Brand Managers Cell code purposes. Most packaged goods companies After completing RFM analysis, every organize themselves by brand. The customer is assigned a Cell Code Cleaning Names brand manager is responsible for which identifies her recency frequency A process whereby names and advertising, marketing and sales of and monetary level of buying. The addresses on a customer or prospect the product. The brand manager is cell code is often used in mailing. list are corrected (addresses typically the main obstacle to database Sometimes used interchangeably with standardized; zips corrected; spelling marketing which is customer focused the term Source Code. and punctuation corrected; duplicates rather than product focused. CFO consolidated, etc.) Chief financial officer. The man in BRC or BRE charge of budgets. Cluster Business Reply Card or Business Reply A way of dividing all households in Envelope Channel the country into about sixty different (1) An input-output device as part of a types, such as “Blue Blood Estates” Brokerage Commission mainframe computer. and “Shotguns and Pickups.” Usually The commission (usually 20%) paid by (2) A means of distributing product to called lifestyle groups. Useful for file a list owner to a broker to handle the the market. For example, dealers, retail segmentation. Clustering systems rental of a list. stores, direct marketing. are provided by Claritas, Equifax, DESIGN IT. WRITE IT. PRINT IT. MAIL IT. PERSONALIZE IT. DEVELOP IT. AUTOMATE IT. MARKETING TECH DOES IT! Donnelley, CACI. In Canada by Controller the marketing needs of the company. Compusearch. A device for managing the data input Once programmed, it can be run daily and output from several devices which or weekly for very little cost. Confidentiality Agreement are connected with a mainframe. An agreement which precedes any These devices can include terminals or Database Marketing contract with an outsourcing agency. disks or tape drives. Collecting It says that your secrets will not be Data on customers and using it to revealed to others. Controller provide recognition and services to Usually have a small computer inside customers, resulting in increased Compiled list them which permits them to manage customer loyalty and repeat sales. Names and addresses taken from the flow of instructions from the directories, newspapers, public computer to the units in an organized Data Enhancement records. People who have something way. They make the computer more A process whereby a customer file in common. Compiled lists are usually powerful. has data appended to it (such as the least useful or responsive for age, income, home value) from some direct marketing. Response lists are Conversion rate external data file. See overlay. better. The percentage of responders who become customers. Data entry Computation Period Also called Keypunching. Entering The number of years from now that Coop mailing names and addresses and other data you can safely project customer A mailing in which two or more offers into magnetic media such as tape. lifetime value. The period is short for -- usually from different companies products that soon become obsolete. -- are included in the same envelope, DBA and share the costs. Database Administrator. A person Continuity who controls a marketing database. Products or services bought as a series Copy The DBA should be someone from of small purchases, rather than all at The text of your direct mail piece. marketing or sales that has the budget one time. Book of The Month Club, or for the database. other products shipped on a regular CPI schedule. Cost per inquiry DDA A banking term for checking account Continuation CPO balances. A mailing to the same list following a Cost per order successful test of a portion of the list. Dealer Training A continuation becomes a “rollout” CPU A process whereby dealers are trained when the entire list is mailed. Central Processing Unit. The heart of a to handle your product. mainframe. Control Group Decile Every database promotion Cross-Selling One tenth of a mailing, usually divided should include a control group of Encouraging customers to buy by percentage of response. customers who are not exposed products from other departments or to the promotion. The success categories Decoy of the promotion is measured by A unique name added to a mailing list the difference in response of the used to spot unauthorized use of the promoted group compared to the Custom report list.