by Phil Rothwell, Sales and Marketing Director, Postcode Anywhere

8 Nov 2011: With Christmas approaching, now is a better time than ever to re-evaluate address management procedures. Even the smallest change can reduce overheads and increase operational efficiency.

It is possible for Christmas marketing campaigns to deliver fantastic response rates for marketers. The festive season provides the perfect opportunity for companies to rapidly expand their customer databases and get as much consumer data as possible. It’s also a good time to make the most of any data you already have. But it all hinges on contact data – because, unfortunately, a large proportion of your campaigns will not even reach the correct recipients. In most cases, poor data quality represents a lost opportunity, or even a lost sale.

It is common knowledge that data decays rapidly. Address data is prone to get out-of-date particularly quickly, with studies typically indicating consumer data degradation is around 10-15% and business data by 30-40% on average every year. The scale of this problem can be accounted for by many factors: human error, changes of address and personal circumstance to name but a few.

But people don’t collectively wait until the day before you run your data cleanse before they all decide to move house. It’s this fact that makes data quality maintenance a continuous task and not something that can be employed only once before a big campaign. In addition, data files are becoming considerably larger and more complex, as is the software managing them.

Christmas is not just cue for chestnuts and mulled wine: it’s invariably the cue for a congested delivery network. The bad news is that no matter why your packages don’t arrive, it’s your reputation that will take some kind of hit. Poorly-addressed mail causes one of the biggest headaches for postal workers at Christmas. It’s in any company’s interest to improve address data quality to reduce the chances of a slowdown at the sorting office.

The consequences of poor address data should not be underestimated. According to research Postcode Anywhere carried out in 2009, incorrect delivery addresses cost online UK businesses around £146m every year. Every year 5.8 million items ordered online fail to appear on the doormat first time because of an error in the address. Conversely, a survey we conducted this year reveals one in ten of shoppers have been put off shopping online this year because of problems with deliveries. This kind of situation, which has the potential to cause serious damage to a small business, is exactly the sort of problem which can be so easily avoided with technology such as address auto-fill.

It is a much better idea to look at preventive measures in addition to one-off cleaning. There are many services you can employ that will improve your operational effectiveness. Maintaining a closer relationship with contact data right from the point of entry is critical. Consistency can be enforced, and the consequences of poor formatting will be improved. Running a periodic data cleanse every six months or just before your Christmas campaign simply isn’t good enough for the competitive business.