Hachette Filipacchi U.S. Partners with Equifax to Enhance Its Customer Database

New agreement will help build out email deployment data.

By Bill Mickey
Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. and Equifax Database Services announced last week the debut of a partnership that has been months in the making. For a three-year term, Equifax will host Hachette's customer database and provide more robust analytical support and, in particular, more transactional data.

"It's been ongoing," said Tom Masterson, Hachette's SVP of consumer marketing and manufacturing, of the partnership. "We took our database to Equifax and it went live in August."

Masterson said the partnership has already relied on Equifax's expertise in data overlays, but the August launch represents a deeper relationship between the two companies.

The database, which has 21.3 million customer names—6.1 million actives and 15.2 million expires—will now capture more data and, aside from the usual customer data, will integrate more email deployment data and response data.

Additionally, Equifax which is hosting the database, will be adding more transactional data, especially from email. "You do modeling with transactional data," said Masterson. "For retention in particular, once you have transactional data you can build effective models and profiles. The data helps you with customer retention, acquisition and reactivation of expires."

Masterson said he liked the idea of having Equifax host Hachette's database because, from a marketer's point of view, third-party hosting eliminates the IT headaches of hosting it in-house. "Economically, you can buy things by the drink," he added. "And for scalability that makes sense."