Michelle Houston
Vice President, Marketing & Database Services
Michelle Houston is our most seasoned circulation professional with over 14 years of direct marketing experience. Since her arrival at LENSER in 2000, Michelle has been involved with managing and executing over 50 different titles ranging from home décor and gardening catalogs to apparel and general gift markets. This experience allows Michelle to develop a circulation department and a list services team that encompass strategic planning for all catalog clients alike. She works closely with these teams to leverage the distinct skills and experience that each LENSER member brings to our clients with highly targeted and effective contact plans and list recommendations.
In addition to her position as Vice President, Michelle is also involved with day-to-day activities as a circulation professional. She develops comprehensive contact strategies for housefile and prospect programs within a single or multi channel environment. This allows her to not only contain marketing costs, but also to build complex forecasts to obtain optimum results for LENSER clients. Michelle works with clients to develop mailing plans that integrate merchandise, creative, database and e-mail efforts to effective customer contact management. As you can see, she is involved with all aspects of building circulation plans, from small plans to very sophisticated mega merges including the development of consolidated marketing databases, vendor management, list selection, merge/purge management and data hygiene processes for various campaigns. You name the project and Michelle will play a key role in assisting with assorted marketing strategies to include and go beyond the scope of circulation and list services.
Prior to joining LENSER, Michelle came from Max Media, Inc, a subsidiary of U.S. Sales Corporation, a $500mm a year national direct mail catalog company. During her five years there, she acted as both Circulation Manager and Media Buyer, identifying key customer and prospect segments to develop and plan future mailing decisions, merge/purge tactics and front-end/back-end performance analysis. She was also responsible for the acquisition of new customers. Prior to her employment at Max Media, Michelle acted as Marketing Coordinator at Gelson's Supermarkets, supervising the company's direct mail creation, planning and strategy.
Michelle is an annual speaker at the Catalog Conference, specializing on sessions involving circulation and marketing strategies. She is also a periodic speaker at the Mail Order Gardening Conference and frequently moderates round-table discussions at local DMA chapters.