During the second quarter, US households received nearly 1.4 billion credit card offers, up 30% from last year, according to Mail Monitor. This caused response rates to drop from 0.6% to 0.3% among households receiving offers as mailbox clutter increased from 4.6 to six offers per month.
“This surpasses the existing record of 1.237 billion offers set during fourth quarter of 2001,” said Andrew Davidson, vice president of competitive tracking for Synovate, Mail Monitor’s parent company.
The second quarter results follow an 8% increase during first quarter that resulted from several issuers returning to the use of direct mail following cutbacks in 2003, Davidson noted.
“The conditions that drove the increase in mail volume in first quarter were maintained during second quarter, which is traditionally one of the biggest mailing periods of the year for card issuers,” said Davidson.
During the second quarter 711.7 million reward or rebate offers were received by US households, up 53% from 464.4 million last year.
“Offers for co-branded cards are a key part of this group,” said Davidson. “However, most of the growth is coming from non-co-branded reward and rebate programs.”
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