Why Mail Date Protection May Still Matter

Mail date protection is an industry standard. For decades mailers have used this term—and tactic—to "protect" themselves and their donors/customers from mailings by other direct marketers. List owners whose lists are available for rental by qualified third parties frequently deny a mailer access to the list for specific mail dates.

Why?

The theory is that the list owner who is mailing its own offer to their house file on a certain date can protect its donors or customers from the solicitations of the third party’s offer. It’s sometimes called protecting one’s "share of wallet." It is also sometimes called just plain silly, but mail date protection is a fact of life in the list management business.

Mail date protection is most commonly found in the fundraising community, where new donor acquisition mailing dates and house file mailing dates are closely guarded. Again, the theory is that if the mailer owns a list of pet shelter donors, it would be a bad idea to allow another animal welfare fundraiser to mail to them on the same day or in the same week. Those who believe in protecting mail dates feel that allowing others to mail to their house file might result in the loss of a customer. What do you think? Let’s look at the process and practice and see if mail date protection is a valid "customer protection strategy" in the 21^st century.

How does mail date protection work? As a practical matter, if protecting mail dates, most list managers are asked to keep a calendar of blocked dates and are given a maximum number of names or "turns of the file" for a given week. This information comes from the list owner. A simple scenario might look this: A prospective renter/mailer has its list broker contact the list manager to request permission to rent 15,000 12 month, $5+ active donors. The broker submits sample mailing pieces, indicating the mailer wants to mail a calendar package on April 27.

Once the sample is reviewed and deemed appropriate, the list manager looks at the mail date protection calendar and determines what dates are available and how many names are already scheduled for that time. If the mail date is already taken, the list manager must now scramble to call on brokers who had previously submitted clearance requests to see if those mailers will actually be placing firm orders for the mailing date(s) requested.

So why are we still blocking mail dates? Mailers believe that their customers and donors are unique to them, and if the customers and donors receive any outside mail—however unrelated the offer and merchandise is—that this will strip away sales and revenue from the list owner.

Let’s jump ahead to today. Mail date protection is still used by some mailers but in a less confusing way. Most list owners will take into consideration all pieces of the puzzle (offer, segment, mail date, likely response rate and quantity), and then determine if it conflicts with their own house mailings or packages.

If they do, the mailer will be denied or offered another mailing date. Let’s be realistic—on a good day, for every 100 envelopes or catalogs that are mailed by a mailer, at best only three or four result in an order. 96% are ignored, which means that 96% of the rented names are not responding to that third party offer. If we deny a mailer’s access to our lists, are we saying that we expect our own customers to leave us and migrate en masse to the other mailer?

And, just because 3% or 4% might respond, it does not mean that these customers or donors will ignore your own offers they have come to enjoy.

So what lies ahead for the future? As a list manager, I have seen many mailers not adhering to the assigned mail date they have been given. I have heard every excuse from "but that’s our in-home date—it’s fine," to "oh, I didn’t realize I had to notify you that the mail date changed!" My personal favorite is when a mailer requests a mail date and also provides an alternate date, but only the alternate date is approved.

But when decoy mailings are received, it’s evident that they dropped their mailing on the denied mail date. So why bother having mail date protection if no one adheres to it? What can be done? Well, you can cut off the mailer that doesn’t comply, but that action results in zero revenue for all concerned. In addition, cutting off that mailer’s access can result in a reciprocal denial of access, compounding the "everyone loses" consequence. It’s just a tough situation all the way around.

If the U.S. Postal Service cuts mail delivery to five days a week (if Congress approves the action) tracking decoys will be even more difficult. At the moment, it can take up to two weeks for mail to be delivered once it has been received at the post office. With the elimination of another day of delivery, it can cause the mail to lag even more than that (perhaps two or three days more), thus making it even more difficult to track decoys.

In addition, we are lacking open studies that provide us with any objective, factual evidence proving that protecting mail dates has any impact—positive or negative—on consumer behavior. In fact, some mailers have done their own internal studies tracking customers’ behavior (based on whether they have been rented to competitors or not) and have determined that both groups in the study have performed equally well.

Watching direct competitors is key and perhaps not letting them mail on the same day you are mailing is a good idea. But it is very difficult to make a case for blocking out an entire week or even a 10-day period. There are simply too many variables that work against a claim that mail date protection works to the list owner’s benefit.

Deana Snyder is director of list management, Estee Marketing Group Inc.