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Home > Special Alerts > Rita’s continued effects on your marketing efforts
Rita’s continued effects on your marketing efforts Dear Friends, While we are grateful that Hurricane Rita was far less destructive than many analysts had predicted, our hearts and prayers go out to the many people who were affected by this storm. We have, in fact, already extended a hand to clients and friends in the area who are in need, and encourage anybody we have not heard from to please let us know if we can help in any way. Even though there are many areas of Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana accepting mail at this time, it’s our opinion that you should remove these states from any of your outgoing mailing lists. People in these areas who aren’t themselves rebuilding are already overwhelmed with pleas to help friends and neighbors in nearby cities and towns who were affected by Rita and Katrina, and will not be receptive to new requests for business. Email addresses in these same areas should also be temporarily taken off of your lists. People in affected areas may not have access to regular email for days or weeks. Their inboxes may quickly fill and send an auto-bounce message, which means that your list management system could automatically unsubscribe them. Losing these addresses could be permanently harmful to your list. Therefore, if you have an integrated database and can identify which of your email opt-ins are in the affected regions, you should use USPS zip guidelines to segment your files. Or, if you don’t have real-world addresses to work off of, ask your database manager to segment names by geography using IP addresses. It’s best to wait until weeks after the tragedy has passed to place those addresses back on your list. It’s especially unfortunate that Katrina and Rita have hit so close to one another, because response rates have now been depressed everywhere, and not just in the affected areas, for almost a month. This is to be expected since, as we’ve mentioned before, disasters like these have always lowered response rates however, now with back-to-back hurricanes, most mailings will continue to be hit hard. We will keep you informed about the best way to handle your marketing efforts in the wake of these storms as new information reaches us. For now, please remember to continue encouraging donations to the Salvation Army (www.salvationarmy.com), World Vision (www.worldvision.org), or other organizations that are helping with the relief effort.
Sincerely yours, Nobody Knows Direct Marketing Better P.S. Starting October 24, California should be taken off of your mailing lists until their special election on November 8. During that time, people will already be so flooded with mailings from political causes, response rates will be significantly lowered on anything else that’s sent out. P.P.S. The last week in December and first week of January typically garner the highest response rates of the year. If you’d like us to put together a campaign for you for those times, you need to call 310-212-5727, or email me at craig@cdmginc.com, right away so we can get started as soon as possible. Don’t wait! |
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