Recency/frequency/monetary value (RFM) models, a building block of direct marketing, work because shoppers who have bought recently or frequently are more likely than others to buy again in the near future. According to Mark Traverso, vice president of Lighthouse List Co., and Michelle M. Volpe, vice president of Media Source Solutions, you can use data about newly issued credit cards for the same reason.
Traverso and Volpe believe that multichannel mailers could use newly issued credit-card data to:
- reactivate customers in your house file
- boost the value of customers who have recently purchased
- find new customers.
“Newly issued credit cards usually indicate a name or an address change as well as a need for a consumer to increase their buying ability,” Traverso says. “Credit-card marketers know that trigger-event data works the best.”
Volpe suggests licensing information about newly issued credit cards so that the most recent updates are sent to your service bureau. “One of the things we know about catalogers is that the multibuyer is their friend,” she says. Consumers who have recently received and used new credit cards “are the same people as the multiusers, so who better for the catalogers to be targeting?”