The Parable Group has revealed details of the marketing group's proprietary direct-mail strategy, including its average catalog response rate.

The move follows the Direct Marketing Association's 2010 Response Rate Trend Report, which showed that catalogs mailed to in-house lists generated an average 2.66% response rate-while Parable has seen a consistent average response rate of more than 16% over the last four years, company officials said.

Based on the Parable Predictive Model, the strategy applies 18 variables from two years of transactional history to manage customer relationships.

"In the mailing industry, the simplest method to select customers is RFM (Recency-Frequency-Monetary), which only considers past behavior," said Jenni Smith, direct mail analyst at Parable. "Our predictive model not only looks at these three factors, but also 15 additional factors to determine which customers are most likely to respond to a promotional mailing, yielding higher returns on our store's marketing investments."

Starting in the early 2000s, Parable was the first in the Christian retail industry to implement database marketing for independent stores, company officials said.

Working with professional circulation planners, Parable developed a statistically based approach for mailing catalogs directly to its stores' customers. Using sales transaction information and sophisticated technology, Parable identifies customers who are most likely to respond to direct marketing such as catalogs and flyers, while developing contact strategies for individual stores.

One of Parable's most successful direct-marketing programs is its New Customer postcard-a glossy color postcard sent within seven days of a new customer being added to a store's mailing list. Since its introduction in 2006, the New Customer postcard has achieved a consistent average response rate of 11%, Parable officials said.

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