10 signs it’s time to outsource your prescreening to a third party

Prescreening is critical for reaching the best potential customers with personalized offers, but financial marketing is a crowded landscape. With so many lenders competing for business, institutions must do everything they can to expand their reach and close transactions.

If you’ve historically handled prescreen marketing internally, this could be the perfect time to bolster your efforts with help from a third-party provider. Here are 10 signs you’re ready.

1. You’ve only worked with one credit bureau in the past

Truth time: data from a single bureau—no matter how it’s enhanced—will never match the results of working with a second or third bureau. With our clients, Deluxe finds that adding in data from a second bureau will lead to 10% lift in response, and a third will bring the total lift up to 20%. That stays consistent irrespective of what bureau is the first, second or third—it’s all about the combination of the three (which is why we offer our clients tri-bureau data, beginning on day one).

2. You need more than just data

Good prescreen marketing isn’t solely a data play—it’s equally important to know what to do with the data you have. A third party can offer data that meets certain criteria, as well as strategy, analysis and advice that will maximize your ROI.

3. You don’t have a team of data scientists at your disposal

Executing prescreen campaigns internally usually requires a team of 3-4 full-time marketers and data scientists working together. If you don’t have that kind of dedicated bandwidth on your team, an external partner can bring in expertise and experienced hands to complement your internal staff.

4. Your personal expertise is digital marketing

Prescreening requires you to make a firm offer of credit. This can be done via direct mail, email, or—for best results—a well timed combination of the two. Marketing campaigns that use direct mail and one or more digital media see 118% lift in response rate compared to using direct mail only. And USPS has shared that combining digital and direct mail results in 40% conversion rates.

Even with strong digital marketing skills, you might not be equipped to execute the direct mail portion of a multichannel prescreen campaign. Effective direct mail requires a specific skill set, and with so much to gain, finding a qualified external partner with direct mail expertise will more than pay off.

5. You want to refine your list with additional attributes

Can your institution afford a mistake? Once you send a firm offer of credit, you can’t deny the customer that offer—even if additional data or analysis might have ruled that person out. A third party will enhance data with attributes from additional providers, not just prescreen providers, to make it more robust, refined and relevant.

6. You send 10-100 million pieces of direct mail a year

You’ve outgrown a direct relationship with a single bureau, but you’re not looking to have a large firm build and maintain a custom database. You just want to purchase the data you need, when you need it, without long-term commitment or up-front financial investment.

7. The credentialing process is slowing you down

The use of personal credit data is highly regulated. Before your company can purchase data from a credit bureau, you’ll need to be credentialed. A client usually needs to complete questionnaires, submit mail pieces, and undergo auditing before a bureau will allow them to purchase their data—and there’s often a cost involved, too. An experienced partner lives in this world; you don’t have to worry about it, because they do.

8. You need to hit the ground running quickly

Analyzing data and building models doesn’t just take manpower—it takes time. At Deluxe, we have off-the-shelf models available for our clients to use, so you can hit the ground running almost instantly. Our data science team can also do lookalike modeling, which can be a great place to start.

9. You don’t have the time to plan and execute a campaign yourself

There are only so many hours in a workweek, and there are certain tasks that just can’t be delegated or outsourced. That’s why finding a trusted prescreening partner with flexible capabilities to share the load can make all the difference. Deluxe can serve as a data provider only, or as a full-service provider, printing, mailing and executing your complete campaign.

10. You have a hunch that your data could do more

Maybe you don’t know what exactly your prescreen marketing is missing—you just have a feeling that there’s room to do better, and you’re not sure how to get there from here. Our team of data analysts would be happy to take a look at your recent data and see what else we could do with it to help you reach your goals.