Case Study: Top Financial Services Firm achieves 20–40% higher campaign performance and 20% data-cost reduction with Merkle

Data-Driven ITA Card Acquisition Drives a 20+% Lift in Performance

A top financial services firm with more than 50 million credit cards in market engaged Merkle to develop new prospect segments for its Invitation To Apply (ITA) credit card program. The challenge: Merkle was not granted access to any historic campaign or customer data, requiring a fresh, data-driven approach without client-provided history.

Merkle leveraged DataSource, its national consumer database, to build prospecting models and used proprietary response and aggregated geo-based risk models to identify and refine target audiences across ITA offers. Merkle’s segments performed 20–40% above campaign averages, drove an 86% lift for rewards offers and a 64% lift for non-rewards offers versus average lists, reduced direct data costs by about 20%, and increased new-to-bank credit card acquisition.