by We, like any list source, would greatly appreciate the opportunity to review and compete against counts and quotes you’ve obtained elsewhere. In most cases, list sources will defend their counts, whether higher or lower, but none other than the compilers themselves will explain one is a current-month “Retail” file and another is from an out-of-date “Wholesale” file.
Even if the website or source tells you it is from Epsilon, Equifax, Acxiom, etc., it is from their out-of-date wholesale file.
Further, 99% of list sources use one source for business, consumer, saturation, specialty, etc. lists-where they currently have a contract. These contracts change from year to year largely based on prices. Since 99% of lists are mailed bulk rate with no returns, list sources get few complaints. Their customers simply don’t know how bad their lists are.
In all cases we suggest you obtain a count from the compilers’ “retail” files to accurately gauge the marketplace universe. In all cases we recommend full count “profiles” by every appropriate demographic of your counts before purchasing.
If you target a certain size firm or minimum income households you’ll want to see counts of all of the available ranges-not just those you intend to use. This shows the overall coverage, the skew, and the anomalies like the 18-year olds with $150K+ income, or the 10-person firm with $10 billion in sales, or the 92-year old doctor that is still “active”. These anomalies exist in every list.
Please visit “Compiler Counts Compared” for illustrations of the phenomenal skew in demographic spreads between various list compilers. We believe it proves why most sophisticated marketers start with the largest business list compiler or Epsilon/Equifax consumer data.