If the need to squeeze everything possible from tight marketing budgets wasn’t already enough, the current enconomic meltdown is just going to make marketers even more accountable for every dollar spent and squeeze even more results from every campaign. Direct mail campaigns wont be an exception and being more expensive in terms of designing the copy, printing the material and postage costs involved, the quality of the direct mailing list is where the focus will have to be.
A mailing list scrub and data cleansing effort is on several best practices guide for improving results on direct mail marketing campaigns. Rightly so since the worst possible scenario for a well drafted and carefully thought out expensive direct mailer is not getting to its intended receipient. The number one cause? Wrong or incomplete contact address data. So why should you use a list scrub before launching your campaigns?
- The cost per lead of direct mail marketing is amongst the highest and can average between 1$ to 10$ so every mail that is not delivered to its target adds up to a significant wastage.
- Non Standardized addresses make it difficult to interpret correct locations and often result in delays. The small task to standardizing addresses and normalizing formats can go a long way in saving time and money
- Missing zip codes, state codes or street names are common in a lot of databases and often overlooked while labels and envelopes are being printed. Small omissions. Big cost.
- Addresses do change from time to time and data does go bad. Verification will help filter out redundant addresses from your database and update them.
- The incremental cost of cleansing a list may add cost per lead but will in fact save a lot more by increasing accuracy and delivery.