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The Impact of Clean Addresses on Your Bottom Line
Dirty data directly affects your bottom line
Whether you use your customer database for direct marketing or for analysis with a business intelligence application, keeping information up to date can be expensive. Even so, "dirty data" is costly and may even have a bigger impact on your postage budget.
In his online article, 5 Address Management Rules to Improve Your Bottom Line Today, Greg Brown, marketing director at Melissa Data, reveals five tips that will save you money and make sure your marketing message is delivered -- with the help of IT.
In light of this week's postage hike in the United States, the need to clean up your data has never been more important. Some of Brown's suggestions are obvious: eliminating duplicates, for example, is a no-brainer. However, Brown goes further in his discussion by explaining the bottom-line impact of each problem. For example, he notes that an enterprise should keep only "deliverable" address in its database. Forget how undelivered mail means your message isn't reaching its intended audience. Undelivered mail costs American businesses over $1.8 billion a year. That's real money, not just "cost avoidance" or other measure of project cost justification.
Brown also breaks down the benefits of using ZIP+4 codes for U.S. addresses (especially for geographic analysis) and examines the benefits of person-to-person communication.
Brown points out the high-level requirements for qualifying your mailings for discounts, directs the reader to available tools that can correct addresses or fix typos in names, and provides some real-world examples of potential savings.
The full article is available here: http://www.melissadata.com/enews/marketingadvisor/articles/0804/2.htm.
About the Author
James E. Powell is the former editorial director of Enterprise Strategies (esj.com).