Q: In the past we mailed to our best customers and to the people on our mailing route list from LERN. Because our best customers live on some of those routes, they receive multiple copies of the brochure in that one mailing. And then they receive another one in the second mailing.
Last semester (to prevent multiples) we mailed only to the mailing routes list in the first mailing (so only our best customers who happened to live on those routes received a brochure in the first mailing) and not ALL best customers. ALL best customers did get a brochure in the second mailing however.
It looks like we might be down 20-30 thousand dollars over last year and I wondered if this could be part of it.
We didn’t have duplicates, but not all of our best customers received a brochure in that first mailing.
Is there a way to use the best customer list and the mailing routes without duplicates in one mailing, or is that a necessary evil?
A: It is hard to know the cause of your decline in registrations and revenue. However, if your best customers did not receive all the mailings, that would be a very likely culprit. The reality is that LERN recommends mailing twice to best customers, so the duplication is actually helping you to achieve what LERN recommends. Programs who do two mailings--one to the general mailing list and a second mailing to best customers tend to have better enrollments than programs who just do a single mailing.