When Should You Prospect

Why is that important? It tells you that if you’re a typical consumer gift mailer, for example, you’ll maximize your prospecting results during the holiday season — so that’s when you should do the bulk of your prospecting.

Let’s say a particular prospect list generates during the holidays a response rate of 1.88 percent and $1.17 per catalog mailed (revenue per catalog, or RPC). Let’s also assume that the incremental break-even point is $1 per book. The response rate for this same list mailed during the summer will be about 1.13 percent with an expected RPC of 70 cents per book, which is way below the incremental break-even point. As you can see, you can prospect to this list above the incremental break-even point during the holiday season. But if you use this same list in summer, expect an incremental loss!