Address Based Sample (ABS) is a Great Way to Target Households

The frame is assembled from the USPS Computerized Delivery Sequence File (CDSF), and it covers over 158 million business and residential addresses. That’s close to 100% of all households in the US. How much better can that get? It turns out, you can do better. 

Researchers Today are Asking for Something More

Researchers want to know the individuals inside the household, including their different age, gender, and ethnic backgrounds. The fact is, target households are not monolithic. Within a household you may find diverse intersections of identities: race, ethnicity, gender, education, occupation, age, surname, and religion. Additionally, each consumer within the household is capable of independent behavior. To lump all of them under one household heading would be misleading.

When You Can Target the Right Respondents Within Those Households, Consumer Intelligence Gets A lot Smarter

By adding name, phone, age, gender, race/ethnicity, and other demographic identifiers such as segmentation data to a selected ABS sample, you can achieve the optimal sampling frame for a project. Researchers can use the combined information to better stratify outreach, then apply treatments that are more effective for subgroups of the population.

The results of this enhancement are un-ignorable. We have seen a 70%+ agreement between what the “frame” indicates for various race categories and what was ultimately collected during data collection. The improvement with employing a stratified design by using MSG demographic appends has ranged by a factor of 10 to 25 depending on the demographics targeted. There are definite efficiency gains to be had here – especially for some hard-to-reach populations.

MSG takes advantage of the latest in consumer information management. This means expanding data availability across multiple data sources and methodologies. With our segmentation and consumer behavior characteristics, the potential is there to expand understanding of household behaviors. The additional sample intelligence can improve coverage and incidence for reaching a target population and help you with non-response data analysis. Appending other modes of contact like cell number and email address provides more touch points, which can increase respondent engagement as well. 

For more information about ABS appends and consumer intelligence, contact MSG today.