Common Design and Data Missteps Can Sink Mail ROI

Even if a direct mailer gets everything right when it comes to list selection, offer and copy, certain common design and data mistakes can boost postal costs, reduce deliverability and cut ROI. Our thanks to Printing Industries of America for a handy summary of avoidable mailing mistakes. The PIA list includes design and mail preparation faux pas, such as creating a flat mailer that could have mailed as a letter for reduced postage; creating an unusually shaped mail piece without calculating the higher postage ramifications; failing to check weight and final thickness and so incurring higher postage; and failing to meet USPS requirements for the address block, either as printed on the outer envelope or viewed via a window envelope. Another group of common errors involves data processing. Mailing list data problems that PIA notes--and that DBM Designs regularly addresses with CASS-certified software, NCOA database matching and merge-purge--include lack of standard USPS abbreviations, punctuation (except the hyphen in ZIP+4), no secondary addresses, no pre- or post-street directionals (N, S, etc.), duplicate names and addresses, and failure to meet USPS Move Update requirements. However, by the time a mail campaign goes to press, it's too late for most direct mailers to cost-effectively avoid mail missteps, even if working with the minority of printers offer mailing services.  Based on DBM Designs' successful direct-mail partnerships, early application of postal and data processing disciplines is the best cure for these common direct mail bugs. See details of all top-10 mailing mistakes: http://www.printing.org/page/9380

With Bad Data Costing Average Direct Mailers So Much, Going Beyond the Average Solutions Pays Off

The average U.S. company wastes $180,000 a year on direct mail that does not reach intended recipients because of inaccurate data, per a handy Lemonly.com report on the impact of bad data. That's not so surprising when a recent Experian survey shows marketers rate a third of their databases as inaccurate, particularly when it comes to addressing. The annual cost of wasted mail is also no surprise if you consider the cost per thousand (CPM) by mail type in the Direct Marketing Association's 2015 "Response Rate Report" survey: CPMs range from about $585/M for postcard and letter packages to $1,000/M for oversized envelopes and $1,200 for dimensional mail. A company mailing out oversized pieces to 100,000 a month with 15% bad addresses/undeliverables will end up with over $180,000 in yearly waste in no time! The biggest source of undeliverable mail (76%) per the U.S. Postal Service is consumer and business change of address from the 17% of Americans who move/change addresses each year. Too many mailers assume that when they qualify for First Class and Standard mail commercial pricing by matching against the Postal Services' National Change of Address (NCOA) database, they've cleaned up the problem. Unfortunately, the NCOA database itself has issues because of lags in recording, look-back time limits (18 months and 48 months), and, most important, the up to 40% of consumer and business movers who do not report their change of address. So in addition to NCOA, mailers should match their data against the several additional Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) databases that draw on private sources, such as magazine subscribers and financial information, to catch the big chunk of address changes and "dead/undeliverable" addresses that fall through the cracks. The savings is easy to calculate: Using several private data sources to find undeliverable and move data not recorded in the standard NCOA database costs between 15 cents and 25 cents per corrected record. These records will otherwise waste anywhere from 60 cents to $1.20 each in direct mail costs. There's also the lost response from prospects/customers who will not receive the intended mail piece, or any other offers. Even at 25 cents per fix, the savings is huge with mail rates as high as they are. Plus, the improved address correction allows for more effective merge-purge deduping and more savings. For a broader calculation of bad data's business impact, see the Lemonly infographic: http://lemonly.com/work/the-cost-of-bad-data/

Study Shows Bad Data Undermining Marketers

If you worry that customer data problems are hurting your marketing results, join the crowd. Poor data quality continues to drag down ROI for the majority of U.S. businesses. In fact, the average U.S. organization believes that one-third of its data is inaccurate, and a whopping 91% of companies believe revenue is being negatively affected by inaccurate data in terms of wasted resources, lost productivity, or wasted marketing and communications spending, according to the Experian Data Quality study released this year. One of the most common culprits cited was poor address data quality. The study definitely reflects the kind of data quality challenges that direct mailers (and their list brokers, printers and agencies) bring to DBM Designs' database marketing services. What are the tasks that usually need to be tackled? Data processing prior to mailing provides address format standardization for proper mail sorting, postal discounts, avoidance of invalid addresses, and removal of wasteful duplicate records from all sources. And with 17% of Americans moving each year, a mailing list check against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database is essential to avoid costly wrong addresses and duplicates. Thorough data processing also helps to detect other data problems, such as missing, incomplete or miscoded customer information, and to create a single-customer view across channels for better segmentation, targeting by channel, and response tracking. For more on the results of the Experian Data Quality study, go to http://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2015/01/29/data-quality-research-study/