Email, Postal List Prices Falling: Worldata

Overall list prices continue to fall, according to the Winter 2012 Worldata (www.worldata.com) list price index.

One list category with a large drop was business-to-business email lists, which fell 22.06% to $159 per thousand from $204 per thousand one year ago.

One principal driver of this decline is the growing number of B2B lists aimed at small to medium-sized enterprises, rather than large corporations, says Ray Tesi, senior vice president at Worldata.

“Maybe the most surprising thing is a shift to smaller and medium-sized businesses,” he says, noting that marketers like financial services providers are now aiming more at smaller companies. “Many technology, financial services and business marketers are seeking to reach the up-and-coming entrepreneurs who built their own companies out of the recent recession.”

The sharpest price drop during the period was in the database/master files category, with a 23.24% decline to $109 per thousand from $142 per thousand last year.
Similarly, the prices for aggregated B2B postal files fell to $80 per thousand, a 14.89% decline from $94 per thousand in the prior year.

At the same time, the prices for business-to-consumer email lists fell 21.57% to $80 per thousand from $102 per thousand last year, making it the lowest priced list category.

“I attribute this to the fact that more and more data sources are coming from many private database response lists,” he says.

The highest priced category was international permission-based email at $403 per thousand, which fell 0.74% from $406 per thousand in the prior year.

Tesi notes that much international direct marketing activity is shifting away from Asia and to Latin America and even to Europe to some extent, despite economic trouble there. This movement began taking place six to nine months ago.

Despite this trend, some marketers are making exploratory efforts to direct market in China while holding back on trying other countries like Russia which still have restrictions on direct mail, says Tesi.

The list category with the highest price increase was donors, which rose 2.41% to $85 per thousand from $83 per thousand from Jan. 2011.

This may presage an increase in the prices of political lists which are expected to rise this year as mailings for Presidential and other candidates go up, says Tesi, noting that it’s too early to tell now what prices those files might command.

The political category was not broken out from those of other donor groups.

Four other categories saw $1 per thousand price increases: books and compact discs ($111 per thousand); business merchandise buyers ($115 per thousand), consumer magazines ($93 per thousand and public sector ($171 per thousand).

Despite the massive growth of mobile marketing and social media, privacy restrictions continue to make lists from those sources unavailable.