Free consulting advice to help improve Direct Mail Campaigns!
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During a bit of surfing last night I came across some research commissioned by the Royal Mail in to the secrets of Direct Mail success. The research of more than 600 mail campaigns revealed the five most important ingredients to boosting campaign success. I’ll abstain from sharing my cynical views about this type of ‘independent’ research, and why my raised eyebrows re response rates (which can apparently be as much as 75%), however, I will of course latch on to their top ‘success factor’ – Data Quality and share you some of my thoughts on the subject...
For me, and probably for you this is at best, yesterdays news, and at worst, depressing. After all these years of PAF files and QAS, why are people still having to talk about the revolutionary, and seemingly new insights in to the importance of data quality (DQ) when it comes to names and addresses (NAD’s) for mail campaigns. Surely companies should have nailed the DQ issues surrounding NAD’s a very long time ago!
A some free tips that will make significant a significant difference to Businesses, their apparently targeted segments, and of course the environment!
1. The Royal Mail needs to pass it’s own PAF files through a data profiler such as Ab Initio’s or Trillium Discovery – This will quickly provide the Royal Mail some data quality issues for them to carry out root cause analysis of their own processes and systems, and provide them a baseline from which they can improve NAD’s DQ. (QAS and their competitors could do this on the Royal Mail’s behalf and send them the profiling results – perhaps you could agree a DQ SLA’s with the Royal Mail and get discounts for the errors?).
2. Large organisations who use multiple versions of PAF validation tools such as QAS should use QAS consultants to review they way in which the manage address validation – If your good, you’ll act on their advise, and if your bad, your hide it!
I have come across very large organisations where for example Billing use different versions of QAS to the Data Warehouse. As no one was updating the Warehouses version of QAS, the Warehouse was effectively overwriting correctly validated addresses, with old/inaccurate versions of the address. Marketing then used the data in the Warehouse for their analysis and campaigns – Doh!
3. If you are like the majority of large organisations out there, you have not been strategically planning your IT landscape, your processes and your organisation around protecting and exploiting your data assets, then the essential ‘band aid’ you need is the ‘golden record’ type MDM solution – I personally have some experience of Initiate and know that every organisation (private and public) will gain significant benefits in 1. getting some quick pain relief and 2, gaining further insights in to the negative affects of not architecting for trusted data, and not running a business ‘with the facts’.
Cue serious voiceover man – “Get to grips with your data and information assets: Make ‘Act on Fact’ your Business mantra TODAY!”
