Credit Card Direct Mailings Continue to Decrease

When was the last time you went to the mailbox and found a solicitation for a credit card that you currently don’t do financial business (banking, mortgage, car loan, etc.) with, or from a company whose products or services you haven’t utilized? If you are like me and many others, it may have probably been a while and whether you like it or not it seems that it will stay this way for awhile.

As credit has gotten harder to come by and card issuers decide to be more selective on the offers consumers are getting approved for; it seems that direct mail is not quite the marketing option that it was in the past. For example, when it comes to the third quarter of 2009, it was recently reported that issuers sent 71 percent fewer card mailings than that of the same quarter in 2008. Looking at actual numbers in the same time period, consumers only received 391 million offers, which is rather small in comparison to the 1.3 billion mailings sent last year.

So is fewer mailings from issuers that big of a deal? Well, for those consumers that just toss the credit card mailings into the "junk mail" pile the answer is propably not, but for researchers and experts the answer is a little different. For experts the decrease shows how banks have become a little bit more conservative on who they are approving and how their marketing dollars are used.