If you've been shopping to rent or purchase a list for your email or direct-mail campaigns, this slide deck might help. Of course, this is just one test in one industry, but the results may surprise you. To be fair, extrapolating numbers like this does leave for a margin of error — how much could likely only be verified by pulling exactly the same number of names from both vendors, deduping the lists, sending both on the same day, at the same time, with the same subject line, and so on. That would be a true A/B test. This is a small data set, with minimal intervention, and is not intended to decide once and for all which is better: purchase or rent. It's just a deck of our findings that we hope will make you go, "hmmmm...."