A Synergistic Approach

Country Store pulls 5 million to 6 million names from Reiman’s subscriber files each year and nets that down to a mailable quantity of about three-quarters of a million, according to Stanislawski’s calculations.

From the Reader’s Digest database, Country Store starts out with 7 million to 8 million names and ends up mailing 250,000 to 300,000. Minix explains that Country Store does the same sort of list processing with the Reader’s Digest database of names, but winds up taking the smaller cut of usable names. “We take fewer names to start, and also get a lower hit rate once they’ve been processed through Abacus or the other co-ops, which makes sense, because those subscribers are a little bit further away from our editorial mission.”