The importance of data

Data is one of the most important factors that can make or break your direct marketing campaign. Even with a killer offer and award winning creative, without data that is accurate and relevant – it’s doubtful that your campaign will work.

Steps to improving data quality

There are several steps you can take to ensure that your data is of the highest quality, such as:

• Understand the contact rules around internal data if available such as when were
  these customers last spoken to, by which channel, how did they respond?
• Ask, is it timely and relevant to be speaking with them again at this time. If not, suppress this data segment from the campaign.
• Has the data been deduped to make sure that you are not communicating with the same customer more than once? It may be that you have the same contact in your database twice with one address being home and one being work. Having one single record for each customer helps to keep your costs down and also helps to improve your campaign response rate as your ‘circulation quantity’ reflects the actual number of single customers communicated to.
• Has the data been cleansed to ensure that all relevant fields are completed, and to ensure data is standardised across all cells and is as accurate as possible?
• Has the data been enhanced if necessary? This involves adding any additional information available from external sources to the customer record. This could involve adding their age and gender so that you can increase the relevance of the offer.
• Where you have more than one business channel, you may be able to wash the internal database against another area of the business to better understand their purchasing activity.
• Ensure that you pay attention to internal and external privacy flags such as customers who only want to be communicated to in a certain way (i.e. email only) and those who don’t wish to receive any communications from you or your business alliances.

If you have an internal I.T department, much of this data cleansing and management could be done internally. If you are mailing data, it’s also highly recommended to use a third party for your final data processing to ensure that bad and duped records are dropped and your DPID (barcoding) rate is maximised so that Australia Post don’t charge you more for distribution. Mailhouses can perform basic cleansing and deduping but there are also specialist data companies available, who can assist you to improve your data to a much greater level. This is likely to make your campaign even more cost-efficient and effective.

Using external lists – tried and proven rules

If your campaign is acquisition-focused and you are relying on external lists/channels there’s a few rules to follow that can improve your response rate and reduce your costs. Some of these are as follows:

• A list that matches your customers purchase behaviour and style is likely to perform better than a list that matches the existing demographic of your customers. i.e. a list of customers proven to respond directly and who pay by credit card is likely to work better than a list of customers over 50 who live in particular suburbs that reflect your existing customer demographic.
• If you are using relevant media publications to acquire new customers – a loose insert is more likely to generate a greater response rate than an advertisement within the publication.
• Still on relevant media – an insert just to the subscriber base is likely to work better than an insert distributed to all readers
• When sourcing lists it’s worth brainstorming potential business alliances whose customers you could target and how the company could benefit from some kind of reciprocal opportunity as this tends to be more effective and cost-efficient than marketing to cold lists.

If you have or want to take a punt on a list or direct communication opportunity, remember to design your campaign to test these unknown sources. This will enable you to control your risk as well as your costs and the knowledge gained will help you to decide on your list strategy for future campaigns.

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