The Puzzling, Frustrating 1 Percent Response Rate

And the answer is, if you mail 5,000 names and get a 1 percent response, that means you’ll receive 50 orders, and statisticians have mathematically determined that 50 responses is the minimum number of responses needed to make results “statistically significant.”

And surprisingly, it actually works this way in the real world. One of my clients recently decided to rent 5,000 names from each of several lists, but he mailed only 1,000 from each list in the first mailing, on the theory that he would then use the results of that first mailing to identify the best lists, and then for the second mailing, he would mail the remaining 4,000 names from just the better lists. An interesting strategy—but it didn’t work. Results of the first mailing showed clear winners and losers—but those results weren’t statistically significant (since he received fewer than 50 orders from each list), and the response rates of the second mailing showed no relationship to the early-mailing results.