As one of the premier automotive mailing list companies, we frequently have clients ask us for pricing for single use and for one year, unlimited use of our data. CLICK ARTICLE TITLE FOR FULL ARTICLE!
Invariably, I caution them that auto data gets “stale” fairly quickly, since so many people change their vehicles in any given month.
Most seem to think I’m simply trying to sell them another list rather than just let them use the data for the entire year, but the truth is that I believe it’s the right thing to do, since buying a new list after a few months will almost always work out less expensive for the client than re-using a list that’s accuracy has declined significantly.
For fun, I checked the approximate number of vehicle changes in our database over the last few months. These changes are NOT address changes, since most of our clients run NCOA on all lists they mail. These are changes in who owns the vehicle.
In the last few months, those changes were 0.51%, 0.94%, and 0.79%, respectively.
That means, on average, about 0.75% of our data change, or, over the course of a year, approximately 9%. Of course, we have months that are much higher or lower.
So, if you start with a list with 98% accuracy (common for our lists), at the end of your year, you’re now using a list with 89% accuracy. That’s a HUGE difference, especially if you’re sending out large volumes of mail.
Think about how much you spend on a mail piece. $1.00? $1.50? If you’re sending out 20,000 pieces at $1.50 each, a decline of 9% accuracy means that you’ve just thrown out 1,800 mail pieces, or $1,800 to $2,400. Buying a new list might have cost you $1,100 to $1,300, depending on your pricing tier.
But, how many of those 1,800 mail pieces would have gone to “good” names/addresses if you had redone the list, and how many of them might have resulted in sales?
Think about that the next time you buy an automotive list….
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John Poris – [email protected] – 248-535-9576 – www.porisdata.com