Issue No. 13 | June 30, 2026 Intelligence for F&I agents, administrators, and dealership finance professionals. Recommended reading before the desk: What the War in Iran Means for DTC and Dealership Marketers. The May CPI confirmation and June FOMC decision make the inflation timeline from that earlier analysis concrete for F&I. THE VEHICLE MARKET NUMBER: +44% BLS […]
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Issue No. 13 | June 30, 2026 Intelligence for direct marketers in insurance, home services, warranty, and protection. This Week: Inflation Confirmed THE NUMBER: 4.2% BLS CPI for May 2026 came in at 4.2% year over year, the highest reading since April 2023, with energy up 23.5% over the same period. The Federal Reserve held […]
Issue No. 13 | June 30, 2026 For warranty administrators who manage loss ratios, reinsurance, and contract performance. This Week: The Persistent Inflation Confirmation THE CURVE: +43.6% / +9.02% BLS motor vehicle repair CPI is up 43.6% since January 2019. In 2025 alone it rose 9.02%. Those are not projections. They are the cost environment […]
Issue No. 12 | June 23, 2026 Intelligence for direct marketers in insurance, home services, warranty, and protection. This Week: The Arithmetic Of CPA THE NUMBER: 3–10x House lists return 5–9% response rates. Prospect lists return 0.5–2.5%. That gap, documented in the DMA Response Rate Report, is typically a function of audience quality rather than […]
Issue No. 12 | June 23, 2026 Intelligence for F&I agents, administrators, and dealership finance professionals. THE VEHICLE MARKET NUMBER: 3–10x In direct-to-consumer acquisition, house lists generate 5–9% response rates while prospect lists generate 0.5–2.5%, a 3–10x efficiency difference documented in the DMA Response Rate Report. That differential reflects what happens when marketing spend expands […]
Issue No. 12 | June 23, 2026 For warranty administrators who manage loss ratios, reinsurance, and contract performance. This Week: Acquisition Quality Flows Downstream THE CURVE: 3–10x House lists in direct-to-consumer acquisition return 5–9% response rates. Prospect lists return 0.5–2.5%, according to the DMA Response Rate Report. That 3–10x efficiency difference reflects the gap in […]
Issue No. 11 | June 16, 2026 Intelligence for direct marketers in insurance, home services, warranty, and protection. This Week: Operational Discipline Is The Performance Variable THE NUMBER: 56.8 BILLION USPS delivered 56.8 billion pieces of Marketing Mail in the fiscal year 2025, per the USPS Annual Report, continuing a multi-year volume decline. What remains […]
Issue No. 11 | June 16, 2026 Intelligence for F&I agents, administrators, and dealership finance professionals. THE VEHICLE MARKET NUMBER: 7 Seven lifecycle states. The Dark Sky Data Retention Analysis Tool classifies every account in a dataset as: Retained accounts are further classified as: based on volume movement relative to the prior period and a […]
Issue No. 11 | June 16, 2026 For warranty administrators who manage loss ratios, reinsurance, and contract performance. This Week: Your Agent Book Has A Distribution You Aren’t Seeing THE CURVE: 7 Seven lifecycle states. That is how the Dark Sky Data Retention Analysis Tool classifies every account in a dataset: Retained accounts are further classified […]
Dark Sky Data has launched a customer retention analytics platform built to classify every account in a dataset by lifecycle state and measure whether a customer base is expanding, holding, or quietly deteriorating over time. The platform processes customer-level revenue or unit data directly from Excel or CSV files. It supports monthly and annual analysis, […]
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