Richard Anderson, Sales Director
REaD UK
REaD UK
At the risk of sounding like a complete heretic, I’m no great fan of the ‘s’ word – suppression. Perhaps the new Dr Who can travel back to the early Nineties and rename the process of identifying gone-away and deceased customers/prospects as something a little more, well… positive. Because suppression, both as a data cleaning application and a marketing mindset, is about so much more than just flagging or removing unwanted individual name and address records. To me it’s always been a means to leveraging the greatest insight and ROI possible from data – not just removing records. Which might seem like so much semantics, but as we’ll see, suppression remains essential data management kit for astute, cost-conscious marketers.
First let me tackle that hoary old chestnut: ‘Why suppress?’ Yes, Royal Mail did send an unsuppressed mailing out to gone-aways about fifteen years ago that did generate a commercially viable response rate (and which is often cited by anti-suppresionistas). But what was the nature of the offer? And what was the volume? Sure, if I had sufficient budget, I too could simply carpet bomb entire regions and, if my offer was sufficiently attractive, probably achieve an effective response rate and thus meet my sales target. But along the way I’d have needlessly spent several hundred thousand quid, mightily peeved countless householders already irked by the junk mail tsunami pouring through their letterboxes and seen vast quantities of my expensive (and probably non-recyclable) DM pieces chucked into the nearest landfill.
Sound familiar? That was what dumb, unsuppressed – and, dare I say, unsophisticated - DM was like. But then a perfect storm of events forever changed the marketing landscape. The public became alarmed at the adverse environmental impact of ‘dumb DM’ (senselessly using the equivalent of 4 million trees per year is kind of a lot, no?) and nigh on every major brand scrambled to appear ‘green’. The estimated £50 million that misaddressed and discarded DM items cost UK businesses annually began to receive press attention, with many marketers receiving ‘Please explain’ notes from concerned CEO’s. Westminster beefed up the Information Commission Officer’s powers, passed the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008) and is threatening to remove edited Role access if the DM industry doesn’t get its act together. Then finally, and most recently, came the big one - recession – and the associated contraction in marketing budgets, consumer confidence and expenditure which has left everyone grappling with new rules and game plans.
Like dodgy Ponzi schemers, the Bernie Madoffs of DM have been shocked to learn that there aren’t infinite numbers of new clients out there to recruit in order to meet their quarterly sales targets. Too many punters have been burned by churn, I’m afraid. Replacing this ‘bigger, faster, more’ ethos are client retention strategies, brand loyalty, response rates and ROI (all of which have become hot industry topics of late), while new kids on the sales block such as transactional data and online lead generation are making claims to recession-busting glory.
But powering all of these marcoms channels and activities is data – the cleaner, accurate and secure the better. And suppression remains customer and prospect data’s best friend. Not as a simple merge/purge process, but as part of data management programmes which are far more intuitive, transactionally responsive and ROI-focussed. Or at least should be.
Look at the issue of over-suppression. Depending how you’ve identified and quarantined your most valuable clients during any cleaning process as well as the kind of match tolerances you’re applying either in-house or via a bureau, in the worst case scenario otherwise marketable name and address records can be inadvertently suppressed. So pre-clean data segmentation is incredibly important. Similar problems can also arise when using deceased suppression products which contain a sizable amount of unverified information. The Mr or Mrs Smith who purchased from you as recently as last month may not have shuffled off this mortal coil, and yet some suppression files routinely classify many very much alive people as ‘probably dead’. Both scenarios are best avoided, I think you’ll agree.
How? Well, simply knowing who your customers are is no longer enough. In order to stay one step ahead of the sales game, marketers should be getting to grips with all transactional aspects of brand interaction – ie. who’s buying what, for how much, and when – and only then proceeding with data segmentation, suppression and enhancement. These types of activities are all essential for keeping data campaign fit, and both individually and collectively are powerful weapons in every database arsenal – albeit ones which must be used with discretion and with clearly defined campaign goal(s)/commercial imperatives in mind.
Specific to suppression products, to my mind the four most important criteria to look at when choosing are accuracy, recency, coverage and price. As alluded to above, files containing inaccurate data can play havoc with client and prospect data, so wherever possible try to ensure that all of the suppression files you’re using contain only verified and non-assumed data.
With ‘warm’ transactional data the new ‘hot’ for many marketers, recency is also becoming an important selection criterion. Suppression files which take months to compile and update may impair your response rates, so look for suppression products with a refresh rate appropriate to your needs.
Even in this more targeted, multi-channel DM environment, coverage still has a prime place at the suppression table. Don’t constrain your marcoms strategy by using suppression files with anything less than the maximum coverage available – whether by market or geographically. Otherwise you won’t be playing with a full data deck, so to speak.
And finally, there’s that old suppression devil: price. Only after ticking the accuracy, recency and coverage boxes should price enter the equation. A suppression file which meets all of your requirements in each of these areas will, after all, represent excellent value for money – both in the short and long term. Once again, ‘pick ‘n mix’ files which have low churn rates and/or incorporate a sizable percentage of unverified data may look like cheaper, viable options. But the additional costs you’ll incur by needlessly marketing to customers who have moved, died or simply aren’t interested in your offer (not to mention those who may have otherwise responded but have been needlessly suppressed), will cost you infinitely more in terms of brand damage and/or lost sales.
First let me tackle that hoary old chestnut: ‘Why suppress?’ Yes, Royal Mail did send an unsuppressed mailing out to gone-aways about fifteen years ago that did generate a commercially viable response rate (and which is often cited by anti-suppresionistas). But what was the nature of the offer? And what was the volume? Sure, if I had sufficient budget, I too could simply carpet bomb entire regions and, if my offer was sufficiently attractive, probably achieve an effective response rate and thus meet my sales target. But along the way I’d have needlessly spent several hundred thousand quid, mightily peeved countless householders already irked by the junk mail tsunami pouring through their letterboxes and seen vast quantities of my expensive (and probably non-recyclable) DM pieces chucked into the nearest landfill.
Sound familiar? That was what dumb, unsuppressed – and, dare I say, unsophisticated - DM was like. But then a perfect storm of events forever changed the marketing landscape. The public became alarmed at the adverse environmental impact of ‘dumb DM’ (senselessly using the equivalent of 4 million trees per year is kind of a lot, no?) and nigh on every major brand scrambled to appear ‘green’. The estimated £50 million that misaddressed and discarded DM items cost UK businesses annually began to receive press attention, with many marketers receiving ‘Please explain’ notes from concerned CEO’s. Westminster beefed up the Information Commission Officer’s powers, passed the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008) and is threatening to remove edited Role access if the DM industry doesn’t get its act together. Then finally, and most recently, came the big one - recession – and the associated contraction in marketing budgets, consumer confidence and expenditure which has left everyone grappling with new rules and game plans.
Like dodgy Ponzi schemers, the Bernie Madoffs of DM have been shocked to learn that there aren’t infinite numbers of new clients out there to recruit in order to meet their quarterly sales targets. Too many punters have been burned by churn, I’m afraid. Replacing this ‘bigger, faster, more’ ethos are client retention strategies, brand loyalty, response rates and ROI (all of which have become hot industry topics of late), while new kids on the sales block such as transactional data and online lead generation are making claims to recession-busting glory.
But powering all of these marcoms channels and activities is data – the cleaner, accurate and secure the better. And suppression remains customer and prospect data’s best friend. Not as a simple merge/purge process, but as part of data management programmes which are far more intuitive, transactionally responsive and ROI-focussed. Or at least should be.
Look at the issue of over-suppression. Depending how you’ve identified and quarantined your most valuable clients during any cleaning process as well as the kind of match tolerances you’re applying either in-house or via a bureau, in the worst case scenario otherwise marketable name and address records can be inadvertently suppressed. So pre-clean data segmentation is incredibly important. Similar problems can also arise when using deceased suppression products which contain a sizable amount of unverified information. The Mr or Mrs Smith who purchased from you as recently as last month may not have shuffled off this mortal coil, and yet some suppression files routinely classify many very much alive people as ‘probably dead’. Both scenarios are best avoided, I think you’ll agree.
How? Well, simply knowing who your customers are is no longer enough. In order to stay one step ahead of the sales game, marketers should be getting to grips with all transactional aspects of brand interaction – ie. who’s buying what, for how much, and when – and only then proceeding with data segmentation, suppression and enhancement. These types of activities are all essential for keeping data campaign fit, and both individually and collectively are powerful weapons in every database arsenal – albeit ones which must be used with discretion and with clearly defined campaign goal(s)/commercial imperatives in mind.
Specific to suppression products, to my mind the four most important criteria to look at when choosing are accuracy, recency, coverage and price. As alluded to above, files containing inaccurate data can play havoc with client and prospect data, so wherever possible try to ensure that all of the suppression files you’re using contain only verified and non-assumed data.
With ‘warm’ transactional data the new ‘hot’ for many marketers, recency is also becoming an important selection criterion. Suppression files which take months to compile and update may impair your response rates, so look for suppression products with a refresh rate appropriate to your needs.
Even in this more targeted, multi-channel DM environment, coverage still has a prime place at the suppression table. Don’t constrain your marcoms strategy by using suppression files with anything less than the maximum coverage available – whether by market or geographically. Otherwise you won’t be playing with a full data deck, so to speak.
And finally, there’s that old suppression devil: price. Only after ticking the accuracy, recency and coverage boxes should price enter the equation. A suppression file which meets all of your requirements in each of these areas will, after all, represent excellent value for money – both in the short and long term. Once again, ‘pick ‘n mix’ files which have low churn rates and/or incorporate a sizable percentage of unverified data may look like cheaper, viable options. But the additional costs you’ll incur by needlessly marketing to customers who have moved, died or simply aren’t interested in your offer (not to mention those who may have otherwise responded but have been needlessly suppressed), will cost you infinitely more in terms of brand damage and/or lost sales.
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