Prospect databases have revolutionised acquisition direct marketing in the UK over the last 10 years. They have enabled credit cards to grow their share from 3% to 25% of all consumer direct mail. They have enabled catalogue marketers to reduce the cost of new customer acquisition and improve the quality of customers.
But many prospect pools are no longer working optimally.

With the introduction of opt-outs from the Electoral Roll, and the development of many new national data sources, the challenge is both how to get the best prospect footprint, and how to build the most effective prospect targeting systems.

There are a number of reasons why large scale acquisition direct marketers are switching from using one off list purchases to setting up long term prospect pools, and we expect that the UK is the most advanced country in adopting this approach.

The key reasons are:

• the reduced cost of data if it is bought on a longer term contract
• the ease of generating large volume campaigns
• the availability and comparatively low cost of the Electoral Roll (even with opt-outs)
• the availability of many different types of data that can be used to support targeting activities( including lifestyle, credit, transactional data pools, suppression files and geodemographic data)
• the effectiveness of the predictive models that can be run on the prospect pool to predict response and sometimes value
• reduced IT costs if names do not have to be continually de-duplicated
• the ability to integrate customer with prospect data
• the ability to manage longer term prospect contact strategy

For many users prospect databases are no longer working as well as they used to. The cost of acquisition has become too high : the quality too low. The original prospect databases are no longer in themselves good enough.

If you want to go into this subject in greater detail download our white papers and case studies or set up a webinar