First Move Direct Marketing

35 Years of Delivering Direct Marketing Success

35 Years of Delivering Direct Marketing Success

How to Give Your Direct Mail Database a Health Check…

Your customer and prospect data is the basis of all of your communication, and you must take care of it. Sales records, customer preferences, and most importantly, names and addresses are your way to generate leads and convert to sales or subscriptions, so you’ll want to make sure you’re armed with the best information. There’s an easy way to achieve optimum performance from your campaigns—by checking they’re in tip-top shape with a database health check.

500,000 people die in the UK each year

6,000,000 people move home each year in the UK

Databases of all sizes—from the thousands to the millions—should be checked regularly, and the reason is two-fold: Not only do you ensure your database is current, you also prevent wastage by delivering costly mailers to out-of-date addresses. Both of these reasons achieve one simple conclusion: Cost savings for you and your company, and extra budget to increase your direct-mail activity.

There is always a natural reluctance to remove hard won names from your data. After the time, effort and cost involved in winning your data to simply remove people inevitably feels like a regressive step rather than a positive one.

A data cleansing or data quality agency can take the legwork out of the exercise, allowing you to concentrate on producing the creative of your mailer. A larger, reputable agency will have volumes of information at their fingertips, that can improve the quality of your database at the press of a button.

Data matching is one such service that takes your current database and compares the records with those they have on file and adjusts or suppresses records that are affected by modifications. These can include out-of-date phone numbers, emails, change of postal and street addresses, and the deceased. By doing so, you eliminate any room for error, and can avoid possibly detrimental and embarrassing situations.

Removing duplicates is also important and also perhaps focusing on 1 name per address?

Your mailing house or data agency can also provide you with more information about your database pulled from a variety of sources. Profiling information that has been provided to other third parties about spending habits, income, family information and more, all with their consent and given to you completely above board so that you can better understand your data – and of course potentially rent external data as you seek to grow your business. Think of the potential direct mail opportunities that can come from this kind of additional data.

Overall a direct mail database health check is something every direct mail specialist should conduct on a regular basis at least twice a year. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and it gives you even more insight into those you wish to convert.

http://www.qas.co.uk/knowledge-centre/support/glossary/data-healthcheck.htm

http://www.datahealthcheck.co.uk/

You might also be interested in the following articles:

5 ways to personalise your direct mail campaign

A guide to testing in direct mail

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