Back in the "old days" of direct marketing, businesses prepared a single mail piece, sent it to virtually everyone, then waited for consumers to buy.

Today, most companies develop a profile of their ideal customers and then create unique sales offers tailored to their needs. This approach is called "target marketing."

It's a simple concept. A lawn mower business wastes money by sending promotions to apartment dwellers. A store specializing in children's apparel will do little business with childless households. And credit grantors will go bankrupt if they offer loans to people who don't pay their bills on time.

By eliminating consumers who don't fit a specific profile, a company can mail fewer--but more effective--solicitations, lower its marketing costs, and pass the savings on to you.

How Your Name Gets on a List
There are three major ways your name might get onto a mailing list:

• Magazines, credit card companies, clubs and organizations, charities, manufacturers, and retailers make lists of their subscribers, customers, members, and donors available to other businesses for a rental fee. If you subscribe to a magazine, have a credit card, belong to an organized group, donate money, or return a warranty card for a purchase you made, your name will likely appear on these lists.
  
  
• List compilers purchase information from various public and private sources to develop consumer databases for specific marketing purposes. There are tens of thousands of list compilers. Compilers rent their lists to a wide range of businesses and charitable organizations for marketing purposes. Nearly everyone's name appears on compiled lists.
  
  
• Credit bureaus provide lists of credit-worthy consumers to credit grantors. These are called "prescreened" lists. If you have one or more credit cards and pay your bills on time, your name will likely appear on prescreened lists. When it does, the credit grantor will send you an offer of credit. To obtain the credit, all you usually have to do is sign your name and mail your response back to the credit grantor.

Prescreened Lists
You can tell if your name is on a prescreened list by examining your mail. Is it from a credit grantor? Does it offer you credit? Is the offer preapproved rather than simply an invitation to apply for a credit card? If you answered yes to all three questions, you've received a prescreened offer.

Prescreening is the way that credit grantors--banks, retailers, etc.--offer preapproved credit cards to consumers. To obtain the names of consumers for these offers, the credit grantor asks a credit bureau to select those consumers from its database (or from a list that the credit grantor supplies to the bureau) that meet specific credit criteria.

Prescreened lists give credit grantors a greater confidence that their new customers will pay their bills on time. Prescreened lists are legal under federal and state laws as long as all consumers who meet the predefined credit criteria receive the benefit of an offer of credit.

Protecting Consumer Privacy
When ordering a mailing list, marketers only want to know whether you fit a specific customer profile. They want to do business with you, not spy on you.

Our lawn mower company, for example, won't waste your time--or its money--contacting you if it knows you live in an apartment. But if you own your own home, you may very well be interested in its 25-percent-off end-of-summer sale.

Hands-Off Procedures
The entire process of ordering lists, generating mailing labels, and sending offers to consumers is automated by the use of computers. Large numbers of names--from a few thousand to many million--are processed at one time.

Marketers don't review individual records. In fact, marketers rarely even obtain custody of consumer names. Third-party companies generally print mailing labels, attach the labels to the advertising mail, and take the mail to the post office for delivery to your home.