Tracking the elusive reader: In this landscape of layoffs and shakeups, a job-hopping audience can be tough to trail. Here's how b-to-b publishers are validating reader information

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 2002 by Susan Thea Posnock

In corporate mailrooms across the country, the in-box that's most often overstuffed these days is the one marked "undeliverable." Jammed in that space are magazines, renewal notices and billing invoices for people who have been laid off, squeezed out or otherwise ousted from companies that are consolidating and cutting back in a worrisome economy.

That's how June Sargent knew she had a problem: The returned mail at The Industry Standard was starting to pile up.

Today's higher employee churn means magazine subscriber and prospecting lists must be updated much more frequently, says Sargent, the senior vice president of consumer marketing and strategy. And so Sargent, along with a growing number of other business-to-business circulation directors, has turned to the phones to chase down readers as pink-slipped personnel resurface in different companies, and new employees replace the old in realigned businesses.

"It was important for us as a company to know that we were not delivering magazines, renewals or event invites to people who were no longer employed," says Sargent. "Why mail a magazine or a renewal that's not going to be delivered?" And so, The Industry Standard hired a telemarketing company to begin a list verification process for both its controlled and paid subscribers.

"We're doing what we need to do now to clean house," she says. And not just for delivery assurances, she adds, but for advertiser confidence. "We want to be sure we're delivering a quality audience to the advertiser. We promise a certain demographic and subscriber, and we wanted to make sure we were still delivering it."

Unlike traditional requalification efforts in which telemarketers are asked to re-sign current subscribers while gathering a long list of demographic data, this process seeks only to confirm reader information. The caller checks to make sure that magazine, with the current address and e-mail, is reaching the right person with the right job title at the right company.

And while The Standard's audience may have been tossed around more than most, keeping tabs on b-to-b customers has become an onerous task even for those outside the dot-com debacle. Job titles change much more frequently--circulation managers, for instance, have become audience or customer managers. And publishers who think a yearly requalification is enough to keep mailing lists current may be mistaken.

"Everybody is reducing staffs; people are moving around and wearing more hats; job functions have changed," says Christine Oldenbrook, vice president of audience marketing for 101 communications LLC. "We need to be aware of that, especially if we're going to drive more revenue out of [current customers]."

Therefore, the need for list verification is definitely on the upswing, she says. "We may have requalified somebody in January, and they may change jobs in February, and we may want to promote a conference to them in March." In this climate, she says, if you lose track of your customers, you lose sales.

FIGHTING INCREASED COSTS

A couple of years ago, few publishers would have considered breaking out the checkbook to pay for this type of telemarketing effort--no matter how elusive readers were. But a number of other monetary factors have emerged to make list integrity a priority. First, direct mail costs have increased exponentially. And as postage and printing costs escalate, list verification is more easily justified as a cost-savings measure.

"Publishing houses do a ton of mail. If they don't get the response they're expecting, they want to find out why," says Bob Aloisio, vice president of sales and marketing for The Telemarketing Company. "Plus, people are trying to find a more economical and efficient way of doing things. And if you can save a couple hundred or thousand mail pieces, or redirect them, that ultimately gives a lift to your bottom line."

And while telemarketing costs overall have become much more affordable, the simplest forms of list cleansing can be especially economical. Verification checks are generally less time consuming than, say, requalification efforts. "Those calls are relatively fast," says Aloisio. "You'll verify maybe 20 people an hour." On average, telemarketing costs range between $25 to $30 an hour, so the final bill can work out to be less than $2 a name. (Most publishers, however, say costs are more in the vicinity of $2 to $5 per name.)

Still, not everyone agrees that this is exactly a bargain. "I think it's important to have clean lists, but as part of that I'm not sure telemarketing is the best route to go," says Scott Cravens, director of circulation, Cygnus Business Media.

"The amount of revenue you would generate out of it isn't there," adds Eric Schmierer, vice president, strategic circulation operations for Computerworld.

But others say it's all in the way you use it. For example, a number of circulation professionals will use telemarketing verification only for certain troublesome slices of their file.

InfoWorld exclusively targets those tech job titles that have the highest turnover rates, says Barbara Ruffner, vice president of audience development. In a recent study, the magazine found that 78 percent of chief technology officers surveyed said they had worked for two or more companies in the last three years. That number was only 54 percent for chief information officers. As a result, Info World segments CTOs for telemarketing verification, but takes a pass on anyone with a CIO title. On outside lists, Ruffner will also put prospects who work at Fortune 500 companies on the call sheets. "We want to at least verify that these people are still there," she says. "Because there's been more rapid movement at those companies in the past three years than before."