It amazes me that direct marketers struggle with circulation planning. I’m not saying that forecasting the future is easy, because it is not. What I am addressing is the crude tools that they use to perform this task. In the thirty years I’ve worked with circulation planners, they have not advanced the process much, if at all. The crudeness of the tools makes the process more complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive than necessary. It is easy to see why planning is done infrequently as it consumes too much of everyone’s time. What I have observed is that most marketing planners are using spreadsheets filled with numbers collected off standard reports, with a few new assumptions thrown in to try to reach those new targets.

Wouldn’t it be easier to use the same process presently in place to make those weekly circulation decisions and extend it to also plan the next set of decisions? I think so. So, score your customers, forecast the performance of numerous marketing campaigns, transform the campaign forecasts into performance forecasts for each customer and campaign, and then apply your circulation cutoff criteria. The result is a process mimicking the spreadsheet tool, except much more accurate, flexible and usable. You are not just making circulation decisions on those campaigns demanding action today, but also those you will act on in the days ahead. You have the start of a circulation decision-making process extensible to multiple campaigns. Planning is now less of a struggle.

About Randy Erdahl
Randy is an analytic marketing champion and is Clario’s Executive Vice President, Optimization Solutions and co-founder. As the executive leader of optimization solutions, he provides vision and direction for Clario Stream Solution development, as well technical leadership to sales, marketing and direct client interaction.