Within Its Sights

Last November Pearle Vision Corp. finished migrating its customer database to an in-house desktop platform. This April, after testing, that move is expected to pay off as a series of highly segmented marketing campaigns.

During that month, the Twinsburg, OH retailer will send out a mailing incorporating 27 cells. The “several million”-piece drop (according to Michael Galperin, the firm's manager of strategy and direct marketing) will include a variety of messages on postcards and magalogs — catalog/magazine hybrids — based on each customer's previous interactions with the retailer.

“When we switched to Klondike [an offering from Central Islip, NY-based MBS], we were able to run promotional analysis from our desktops,” Galperin says. “That's opened the door to more complex segmentation for us.”

This will include breaking down offers based on whether a customer has paid through an insurance program or not. Among those who do, Pearle downplays discounting. With insurance firms picking up most of the tab, price-based messages haven't been as effective to these people. For them, the company might send a note that the customer's benefit year has restarted, or otherwise mail a reminder of the coverage.

The company also will trigger mailings based on the date of the customer's last eye exam, if it was done at a Pearle location.

Furthermore, through initial mail tests, Pearle has found what it feels are the ideal times to solicit customers to repurchase disposable lenses. It seems that, regardless of how large a supply of lenses customers buy (30- or 60-day), most like to be reminded around 15 days before they're scheduled to run out.

All this is possible because the immediate access to the new data has cut a campaign's turnaround from a few months to three weeks, Galperin says.

Does using this sort of medical data invoke the specter of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the federal law mandating the use of medical information in marketing? Yes — and so far it's been good for the company, according to Galperin.

“We no longer can send mailings to the customer and not have them tied to their eye health,” he says, adding that any information gained in conjunction with an eye exam falls under HIPAA's rules.

This has prevented Pearle from bombarding customers with retail offers, and caused the company to craft relevant messages based on health — messages that Galperin feels have been more successful than, say, new lines of eyeglass frames.

The one thing the new database hasn't done (because no database could do it) is cause Pearle to invest in prospecting mailings.

“We've dabbled, but the challenge is looking at the purchase cycle. If we don't know when their last purchase was, we might reach them when they are out of the [roughly two-year] purchase cycle,” Galperin says.