The start of the new year is a good time to put your direct marketing efforts on a strict regimen of data hygiene. By some estimates, up to 30% of those customer names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail lists you’ve been compiling over the years may have gone dark in the last 12 months. It’s time to shed that flabby data and slim down to competitive weight, for reasons that go directly to your bottom line.
Using lists that have not been properly groomed can waste money when a marketer tries to do a mailing. For example, how do you know that the customer who hasn’t bought in two years didn’t move or change jobs six weeks after entering your store for the last time? Or that his old home address isn’t now a commercial building? How do you know that cat-toy catalog isn’t now going to someone who’s allergic to pets?
But old customer information can also take a toll on the reputation of your enterprise. Starting this month, of course, businesses engaging in telemarketing are supposed to hold their lists up against the national Do Not Call registry on a monthly basis rather than quarterly. And getting too many bouncebacks from old addresses in an e-mail campaign may also get you flagged by service providers as a possible spammer— making further e-mailing difficult at best.
The best policy is a periodic database check-up to make sure your lists are up-to-date and optimized for marketing purposes. To get a better picture of how that should be done, DirectTips asked some of the experts at infoUSA. It should be noted that other database companies offer many of the same cleaning services for small business lists; and available software will let small businesses at least try to perform most of these steps themselves.
Mailing lists: The first step toward a clean, optimized mailing list is to check address standardization and ZIP+4 codes against the U.S. Post Office files, making changes where necessary. Standardization involves making sure that street prefixes and suffixes match USPS formats: changing “Ave.” to “Av.”, for example, or “North Lake St.” to “N. Lake St.” Spellings of street names are also checked against USPS files.
It’s also important to check cities in cleaning a mailing list. “Here in Omaha, we have suburbs called Millard and Papillion, and sometimes the client base will assign an address to Millard NE when it’s really in Omaha,” says Kent Stoneburg, vice president of mid-market for infoUSA Direct. “We’ll make those changes for them.”
To make a list useful for mailing, you should also append information to each address from the Delivery Sequence File detailing the carrier route code and the USPS line of travel. The carrier route number designates the delivery territory for a particular post office; line of travel organizes the addresses in that territory to suit the actual path the letter carrier takes in delivering the pieces. This enables you to get postal discounts on your mailings by sorting them according to USPS procedures before it comes into the building.
Once the addresses have been cleaned and organized, the names attached to them are checked against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database, another USPS file. If name and address match, the file stays untouched; if they differ, infoUSA will append more current address information for that name.
In addition to checking names against the NCOA, database companies such as infoUSA can on request bump those same names up against their own internal files to check even further for changes. Lists can also be cleaned of addressees who may now be deceased.
At this point, with address changes entered and verification that the residents still live there, the list holder can apply for Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) certification. Under CASS, your list addresses are warranted to have the proper carrier route, 11-digit ZIP and delivery point codes. You then receive a form that will show the Post Office the accuracy of your lists and the discount you qualify for. Without CASS, you cannot mail at bulk rates and must mail first class.
Phone lists: Companies like infoUSA can offer businesses a verification service with “phone append”: checking to make sure that phone numbers are unchanged from the marketer’s list, filling in those that are missing, and if changed numbers are found, adding them to the existing customer files while keeping the original numbers on file.
Now that would-be telemarketers have to check their phone lists against the Do Not Call register once a month, it only makes sense to include this as a step in periodic phone list cleaning too.
E-mail lists: This one is a bit tricky, because there is no e-mail equivalent of the NCOA. Some companies do offer services that match e-mail lists to address lists gathered from individual ISPs, but these can only be incomplete. After all, most people just abandon old e-mail addresses. Many accumulate three or four active ones that they reserve for different purposes; that doesn’t mean that they want to hear from you at all of them, or indeed any of them.
For the most part, policing existing e-mail lists is up to the individual enterprise. Pruning e-mail lists back to only the actively interested recipients takes time and effort, but it will pay off in improved return on investment with your next e-mail campaign. Think of it as practicing good marketing ecology, keeping the e-mail channel viable and open to all legitimate marketers.
The way to cut back dead wood on your e-mail list is through a retention mailing. Subtract from your e-mail list the customers contacted so recently they don’t need to be checked, and the ones so old that you have to assume they haven’t been active for a long time. Whoever remains should get an e-mail reminding them who you are and how they opted to receive e-mail from you, and giving them some mechanism for stopping that contact. This can be either an opt-in method—clicking a link to keep receiving e-mail—or an opt-out choice—clicking a link or replying “unsubscribe” to cease contact.
Practicing good list care in all these forms requires commitment and constant attention, but it pays off in both production costs and ROI. With your newly-scrubbed database in hand, you can start direct marketing with confidence: mailing bulk rate instead of first class, saving money by not printing brochures for customers who have moved away, and avoiding the suspicion of spamming.
“It’s just like going to Jiffy Lube to have your car serviced every three months,” says Rakesh Gupta, head of infoUSA’s database group. “Periodically, on a regular basis, you get your oil checked, transmission and brake pads checked. Data hygiene is the same. There are scheduled things you have to do to keep your file up to snuff. Every six months you want to check the NCOA, every three months you want to update your files or do something else. It requires discipline.”
