Direct Mail Quick Tips

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Some useful information for retailers to consider for their database marketing efforts this year – pulled from the Experian 2010 Holiday Marketer benchmark and trend report.
Direct-mail quick tips:
As significant time and money continues to be invested in planning and producing holiday marketing campaigns, the following techniques should be considered for “mailing smarter.”  These best practices provide effective ways to boost response while reducing advertising costs and direct-mail waste.

• Strive for the highest levels of ZIP+4 ™ coding for your mailings.  Not only do you benefit from postage savings, but you also can improve performance more than 100 percent, on average, on records that were previously noncoded.
• Utilize proprietary correction services that correct the missing  or invalid secondary or unit numbers.  Analysis has shown that mailings without apartment numbers that are destined for multiunit or high-rise buildings perform at 40 percent to 50 percent below their expected achievement.
• Employ NCOA services regularly and as close to your mail date as possible to meet USPS Move Update requirements and improve your response.  Mailing to an old address has shown to decrease performance up to 25 percent of what is average for the campaign.
• Utilize the USPS ACS ™ service to identify additional movers.  Over the course of a year, this will help identify 2 percent to 3 percent more moves.
• Take advantage of special suppression files to eliminate undesirable records from your mailings, such as deceased, prison, old address and undeliverable as addressed files.  Doing so will remove records that generally underperform in your mailing.
• Use industry suppression files from the Direct Marketing  Association and Catalog Choice to eliminate consumers who have chosen to opt out of direct-mail offerings.
  Eliminate records from your mailing with potential deliverability  problems.
• Use of a ranking tool can identify the poor-quality addresses in your mailing that tend to perform at 30 percent or less of the performance of the overall mailing.