United States Postal Service Taps Harte-Hanks to Optimize its Business-to-Business Marketing Harte-Hanks Allink® applies database marketing and analytics to help USPS better segment and
target customers to increase product awareness and marketing results
Monday, 17 July 2006
Harte-Hanks, Inc., a worldwide, direct and targeted marketing company announced that it has expanded its relationship with the United States Postal Service (USPS) to provide data-driven marketing as part of the USPS's business prospecting system. With the Harte-Hanks Allink® database marketing solution, the USPS plans to execute more targeted campaigns while seeking to measure more accurately its marketing success and build awareness of its business products.
"With Harte-Hanks, we've been able to more effectively identify and target both small and large business customers," said Tina Lance, manager of segment advertising, USPS. "We can also quickly measure campaign responses to see how successfully we're building awareness and increasing sales for our products among our target audiences and segments."
"Harte-Hanks works with many of the largest and most innovative direct marketers in the world, across both mainstream and unique sectors, affording clients such as the USPS a deep understanding of the requirements for successful customer-centric marketing," said Kathy Calta, corporate officer and senior vice president, Harte-Hanks, Inc. "By developing the right database marketing and analytics solution to meet the Postal Service's needs, we have quickly and positively affected the organization's bottom line and optimized customer loyalty through multichannel, one-to-one interactions."
While unique in its affordable postage, reach, and market penetration, the USPS has experienced flat revenue growth for First-Class Mail, among other mail classes, as a result of numerous factors. To combat this trend, and to promote awareness and sales of its many business products, the USPS initiated work with Harte-Hanks to identify business customers with potential to spend a larger allocation of resources on USPS products and services.
HARTE-HANKS ASSISTS USPS WITH ITS B-TO-B DATABASE MARKETING – 2/
After conducting a thorough marketing assessment, Harte-Hanks designed and developed an integrated and centralized marketing database to support the organization's prospecting system. Partnering with the USPS, Harte-Hanks then implemented best-practice analytics to better segment and target business customers. Customer and prospect data, consolidated and housed in the database, now can be used to achieve two top marketing objectives: promoting its products, spanning Priority Mail to Click-N-Ship to Carrier Pickup, and increasing direct mail awareness and sales with business audiences.
As part of the ongoing relationship, Harte-Hanks manages inbound response activity, processes weekly updates of the hosted marketing database and manages list pulls for e-mail and direct mail campaigns. Additionally, an analytics team at Harte-Hanks produces reports, online tools and analyses to ensure marketing campaigns are measured, and to support segmentation and predictive modeling for future efforts.