Maximising Delivery Success
by mark.higginson, Qbase, 16/10/2006
Quality Address Management Key to
Maximising Delivery Success
Data quality is often low on the agenda for many organisations, but to maximise the opportunity of contacting the correct individual with any key mailing piece that has taken time to put together, address management should be taken very seriously.
It is estimated that over £70m is wasted annually through undeliverable and misdirected mailings. Poor quality addressing also causes irreversible damage to the brand.
Data Management Bureau, Qbase sees an amazingly varied approach to data capture. Database Consultant Mark Higginson discusses the factors that affect data management and what should be considered to achieve success.
Data management can often be the most undervalued and least-worked asset within a company yet it could yield significant additional revenues if planned and managed appropriately. Quality address management is crucial to the success of a marketing campaign but a recurring question that needs deliberating is ‘how do you define a quality address?’
There is a long standing argument between address purists who believe that the Royal Mail Postal Address File (PAF) is the only address to adhere to and those who believe that the PAF doesn’t hold enough information to maximise the delivery of direct mail.
Although there are some benefits of using the Royal Mail PAF standard, particularly with consumer data, it can also cause difficulties and companies should consider all angles when deciding on what will benefit them.
The PAF file contains the UK’s 26.5 million postal addresses and changes at a rate of over 400,000 records per year. It carries the essential address components that are required to deliver a piece of mail.
Many of our clients tend to collect more information than exists on PAF. For consumer addresses, this could be a vanity address such as ‘Rose Cottage’. Unless Rose Cottage is the registered name of the premises, it won’t exist on PAF. A local postman will know where Rose Cottage is but if companies wish to adhere to the PAF standard, this component will be removed. Whilst this will not render the mailing piece undeliverable, it may irritate a valued customer.
Difficulties in using the PAF standard address tend to arise more in the business to business world rather than the consumer world. When targeting a known contact within a large business, the data captured address is likely to contain a department or floor. PAF will not contain this information so anyone looking to make the address match the PAF standard will lose this vital delivery information.
‘Anecdotal’ instructions such as this, which don’t exist in a Royal Mail PAF standard, means businesses need to consider at what cost the loss of this information is when targeting a large organisation. For example, how many Mr Smith’s exist at 1 Canada Square?
For Qbase, a combination of the automated PAF route and manual intervention of the standard address yields the best results. Spelling errors, abbreviations and poor structures can be resolved but the important personal information is retained.
Companies need to strike a balance between the PAF standard and non-standard address.
The key lies in defining what data should be captured from the very beginning. Companies collecting data through call centres, websites and sales centres et cetera, should consider what they are likely to need and how many fields should be made available.
When considering data capture through websites, for example, most companies now opt for the quick address approach. The user only needs to provide their postcode and premise number and the rest of the address will auto-populate. This means that the address captured automatically meets the PAF standard.
However, there is no room for additional information, e.g. ‘Rose Cottage’. Therefore companies can provide the user with an option to confirm or amend their address, offering the opportunity to add ‘Rose Cottage’. This is a good way of capturing the information, but as we have seen on almost every web based data collection system to date, ‘Mr Mickey Mouse, Disney Street, Disney City’, will invariably make an appearance.
In order to combat this, as a data management bureau, we have had to build up an extensive list of known felons, ranging from ‘Mr Tony Blair, 10 Downing Street’ to ‘Homer Simpson, Springfield’. These rogue entries can then be suppressed from campaigns.
In order to avoid this happening in the first instance, a customer must be given a reason to provide their correct details. Incentives such as free gifts or exciting people with relevant future communications can be successful options. People only tend to make up their details if they think they will be bombarded with unwanted direct mail. It’s important to make it clear to customers that their information will only be used to benefit them.
These issues don’t tend to occur when collecting B2B data or when a purchase is involved. However, considering the capture of additional data is still important. Allowing additional fields for a company name, job title and department to be supplied, but not making them compulsory, is a workable solution.
If these fields are not provided, the information tends to end up in the address fields and a huge amount of time needs to be spent manually searching for information such as job titles and departments in the address fields.
Again, we have look-up tables that allow us to search for string patterns in the address fields. These account for all sorts of spelling errors in job titles. If we were to re-build the addresses using the PAF standard, we would simply drop this information from the address. Whilst this reduces the production costs for the client, it also means that important information is being lost.
We also see a number of companies using free form address capture, where a box is provided and the customer is expected to provide their name and address details in the space provided. This can lead to all kinds of format issues. For example, if the form is hand-written, it is open to miss-interpretation, especially if the data capture is being completed off-shore. A number of these issues are combated by simply providing the customer with a clear structure to follow – Title, Forename, Surname, Company (if applicable), Address1, Address2, Address3, Town, County, Postcode, Telephone, etc.
Catering for poor hand-writing is never going to be easy. We have to conduct stringent quality checks on this kind of data capture to ensure that a name captured as Danlel, is corrected to Daniel. This is a very manual, time consuming and quite difficult process, but is sometimes unavoidable if this style of capture is a company’s only option.
With so much to consider when planning address management, the best solution is often a difficult decision for companies.
Different data capture structures work in different ways and companies should decide on what will benefit them. If limited space is made available on your printed material for the address, you cannot include everything. Your options are to either provide more white space for the address or exclude certain details. If you manage your goneaway returns, you can see the effect of reducing the printed information.
Of course, data collection is not just about the delivery of direct mail. Good data collection also allows for demographic analysis and from this perspective, the more information available, the better. The key is in the planning, if you can answer the ‘what, why and how’ questions, you are well on your way.
