Data Sourcing

Global – October 29, 2026 -- Differentiated audience sourcing has indexed 10% to nearly 50% higher in response than legacy list mixes across direct mail acquisition campaigns, according to Chris McDonald, President and CRO of Path2Response.

Cost-focused sourcing models treat data as interchangeable

McDonald argues that the older playbook of cutting list cost, narrowing the number of sources and using overlap as validation worked when providers differed mainly by scale. Providers now differ in signals, recency, refresh cadence, modeling agility and processing sophistication, he says. Circulation plans that favor tenure and overlap keep resurfacing the same names across providers, and performance converges.