Strategy: Prospecting to Selected ‘Pockets’

In fact, many 12-month buyer counts have been decreasing. This means catalogers are exhausting the files and re-mailing the same names again and again. Fatigue sets in and response rates decline. This is causing a shift toward the use of more prospect names selected from cooperative databases.

The quantity of names available from the co-ops isn’t increasing, either. But co-ops can help expand the prospecting universe though statistical modeling, which identifies more targeted models worth testing. Cooperative databases account for at least 60 percent of all consumer prospecting, which is up from my estimate just two years ago.