You never know what trends will pop up unexpectedly in acquisition programs. Recently, we noticed that multi-buyer list performance has been waning in one client’s direct mail prospecting program. A quick check revealed that this depression coincided with when we’d started using commercially compiled lists. So we did some analysis to see if, in fact, compiled list multi-buyers were pulling down overall multi-buyer performance. For this client, that turned out to be the case.

One theory is that multi-buyers on compiled lists could have less of a direct affinity for an organization, thus pulling down response rates. While we’re not saying multi-buyers or compiled lists are dead leads for DM acquisition, we are reminded why reviewing performance is so critical to ensuring our list priorities are as productive as possible.