According to the Abacus Indicator, a service of Broomfield, CO-based cooperate database services provider Abacus, the average house file response rate for the fourth quarter of 2004 was 3.62%. That’s down 11% from a response rate of 4.09% for the same period of 2003. What’s more, the average dollars-per-book fell 15%, from $5.63 to $4.76.
“This data puts an exclamation point on what was a general feeling of mixed results coming out of the holiday season,” says Casey Carey, Abacus’s vice president of marketing, data solutions. “Though most titles reported single-digit increases in sales, performance on a book-by-book basis was not as strong. The biggest factor driving this was increased circulation — in particular mailing to less profitable segments of the house file. To offset this in the future, mailers should look beyond house file RFM selections to custom house file or cooperative database models to improve results.”