Database Marketing: Use a Spending Index to Target Shoppers With Money to Buy

The challenge for today’s catalogers is to more effectively identify and target those prospects who have the capacity to buy and the propensity to purchase specific products. What’s the most effective way to get and maintain your share of wallet in a highly competitive multichannel market?

Many of the measures catalogers use in their targeting efforts, such as household income, tangible assets (house, car), spending habits, and traditional recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) segmentation, have either been fully exploited or just aren’t reliable indicators of a person’s capacity to spend. Thus, they don’t allow you to truly distinguish your ideal customers.