Reduce your mailing costs to improve your ROI

Whether running your latest mailing campaign to your existing customers, or attempting to recruit new customers, a successful direct mail marketing campaign depends on clean mailing data.  DDS offer a comprehensive range of data cleansing and screening services, to enable you to get the best ROI (Return on Investment) for your mailing.

Try out our completely free data audit service, giving you a clear report on the quality of your data, potential improvements and cost savings that can be made by either selecting a complete data cleaning bundle, or by choosing the options you prefer.

Data cleaning, in the context of mailing lists, encompasses services such as the following.

Why do you need clean marketing data?

Every year, about 6.7 million people in the UK change address. That accounts for around 11% of the UK population. About 600,000 people die each year. It is easy to see that the quality of any data can decay over time.

Information may have come from many sources, and may not have correctly formatted addresses, and in the case of a prospect mailing, official exclusions such as MPS may not have been applied.

There is of course a cost associated with data cleansing, and when trying to keep within budget there may be a temptation to cut costs at the data preparation stage. However, cleaning your mailing data will often save you money and increase your ROI in three ways.

1. Save on mailing cost 

Sending your latest catalogue to somebody that has died or gone away is a waste of money,  as is sending duplicate mailings.

Royal Mail, as well as several downstream access providers offer significant discounts for mail delivery when data has been formatted and validated to their standards. Having cleaned your address data and formatted it the required standard, we can then Mailsort the data for you to take advantage of any mailing discounts available.

2. Increase response rate thus improving your ROI

Direct mail is an effective medium, often achieving better response rates that digital marketing. Response rate is influenced by many factors, including of course the quality of the mail item, and its relevance to the recipient, but as the old saying goes, first impressions last.

If the recipient sees that their address has errors in it, or there are three identical envelopes on their doormat, each with only slight variations to their actual name and address, then they will not be filled with confidence that the sender is a well organised, efficient company.

A correctly cleaned mailing list will be free of duplicates, with their addresses verified and corrected against Royal Mail PAF.

3. Reduce returns processing cost

Mailing deceased or gone away customers or prospects will result in an increase of returns which must be processed to produce an exclusion list. The per item data entry cost alone is often more expensive than the per hit cost for suppressions and when thousands of returns come back, the total cost can be substantial.

By applying a full range of trusted gone away and deceased suppressions before the mailing list is used, the number of returns that must be processed will be significantly reduced.

Why not read our blog post that gives a real world example of the savings that can be made by ensuring the mailing data is clean and increasing your ROI.

How clean is your mailing data?

Find out today, by using our completely free data audit service with no obligation. See how much you could save on your next mailing using our data cleansing services.