So much is known about so many households that we can virutally hand you your competitor's customer mailing list.   You would be stunned by what Cwi Associates knows or can guess about your customers and your market.

As the public grows wary, traditional and e-businesses are increasingly aware of the consumer's desire for privacy.   Customers need to be assured that the information they volunteer (or we compile via tracking their behaviors) will be kept private and only used in ways the consumer perceives as beneficial.

• Some consumer information is public unless prohibited by state law such as motor vehicle registration information and information on drivers licenses.   Other public sources include property deeds filed and information supplied when applying for credit.

• Many catalog and bricks and mortar business are happy to sell their customer files or at least allow them to be used in cross promotions with partners.   Information about your buying habits can range from the magazines you prefer to the information you've requested.

• We can take information from one source and overlay it onto your buying habits.   For example, we might see that you recently responded to a direct mail solicitation and understand from another source that you requested ski resort information.

• What we don't know about you we can probably guess.   If you ski there is a known probability that you also golf.  We can use lifestyle research profiling the target market and use that information to select the age and gender and income that best fits.  And we can then overlay geographic and other data relevant to targeting.

The Internet allows us to enhance the impact of smart direct mail by providing a supplemental "call to action" for those not ready to buy and afraid of picking up the phone or stopping by the store.

• If we can get the future customer to your web site, we can answer their questions about your offer.   If appropriate, we could give them a coupon or otherwise interact with them.  If they use the coupon, we can track it in the store or on the web site and otherwise begin to follow their purchase patterns.

To help you, we often start by focusing on your best customers.   Are you able to describe your "profitable" customers?  The more you can tell us about your best customers the more effective we will be in using lists and data to help you target for new customers.   If there are geographic patterns we need to address, we'll find them by mapping your current customer file.

• Many businesses target families because the family unit consumes more.   Among families, you may wish to target new home buyers because these are households planning to stay awhile so that your investment in acquiring them as a new customer is rewarded longer.   They may be households with or without kids.   We need to know and so do you.

Generally you have a specific budget and you want to purchase a list of names most likely to respond to your offer.   But we make sure that your investment in "a mailing list" has extra value.

• First of all, let's track the number of households on the purchased list that are already on your customer file.   If we are clever in how we purchase the list, we can compare it to your customer files in ways that shed light on your own market share right now.   Another example of our State of the Art Street Smarts.