For more than seven years I have been getting offers for credit cards from Airlines and Banks. One particular bank has been sending me these solicitations for more than seven years. That is 12 mailings per year, more than 72 mailings so far, remember these are physical paper mailings not the electronic kind. I don’t like the junk, it hurts the environment and worst of all I think its not good use of the data they have. How hard is it to design a system around the data they have.
Lets say they have a table of all the targeted customers they want to send a credit card applications to, why not have a attribute on the table for counting how many times the solicitation was sent, or they can even have the date the first solicitation was sent.
Customer
Name
Address
City
FirstSolicitationSent
or
Customer
Name
Address
City
Solicitations
So they could say if the days between today and the firstSolicitationSent is more than 90 days, then not send another solicitation, or if this number of solicitations is more than three do not send another solicitation.
This allows them to not send solicitations for years and ultimately loose the customer, I understand the argument of the customer needing time to react to the solicitation, but seven years of trying to convert a prospect is pure waste of time and effort. The data available can be used in better ways to reduce waste.