Weak Data Can Kill Good Creative
So you’ve put together an amazing direct mail campaign, covering all the bases from a creative standpoint. You have a beautiful design, brilliant copy and and offer that simply cannot be ignored. Everyone is excited as the mailing goes out and the wait begins. Yet, somehow, you keep on waiting, and waiting until it becomes painfully clear that this brilliant campaign has fallen flat on its face.
Before long, fingers start being pointed and accusations (veiled or otherwise) start being hurled like rotten tomatoes, as attention invariably comes back around to the apparent (though shocking) failure of the creative. But before we bring down the headsman’s axe or do anything too hasty, maybe there is something else that could be the cause of this apparent failure.
Maybe we should turn our attention to the data.
We often hear the much-heralded phrase “Good data is a key ingredient to the success of any direct marketing campaign” (or at least something very similar). But just how important is good data, really?
The easiest way to answer that might be with another question. Who would mail their best marketing piece to a list that is only 1/3 (or 33.33%) accurate? The answer is obvious: no one would do that intentionally. Yet, though it is perhaps somewhat shocking, when we take into account that about 20% of Canadian households and businesses move every year and about 44% of the addresses on uncleansed mailing files contain one or more errors, it becomes almost frighteningly apparent how something like this could actually happen.
Let’s break this down a little more.
If we apply these statistics to a file of 50,000 consumer records, this means that, in just one year, 10,000 of these consumers will move to a new address! We might be able to follow this trend forward and say that a total of 30,000 would move over 3 years. However, assuming that some of those frequent movers are actually the same people, let’s drop that number and suggest that 20,000 might move over a three-year period.
That’s still a pretty hefty chunk of the data file!
Of course, there may be some who would argue that, if a piece is promoting a service such as carpet cleaning, swimming pool maintenance, roofing services etc. then it could still be relevant to the current occupants, regardless of who the piece is addressed to. There may be some truth to this. However, as part of common courtesy, many people simply will not open mail that is addressed to others, so if an envelope is used, the overall effectiveness of the mailing could still be effected. Something like a postcard might convey the message regardless, but, it’s still not the same as receiving something with one’s own name on it.
Now, if we look at the address accuracy challenge, our statistics tell us that, on a file that has not been processed through an address accuracy and correction program, an average of 44% of the addresses will have errors in them. So now we have a file where we are mailing to only 60% of the correct consumers and, of these, only 56% of the addresses are correct. This means that only 33.6% of the records contain the right consumers at the right addresses, which is pretty close to the 1/3 that we cited above!
When we consider the foregoing, is it any wonder that even some of the most brilliant campaigns just don’t do as well as expected? In the direct marketing industry, a 1% response rate is considered to be very good, so let’s assume that this is the target goal for our 50,000 piece mailing. If only 1/3 of our records are actually accurate, then 1% of the accurate records is approximately 167, which of course translates to only 0.334% of the total file, a number that falls well below the target.
Okay, we’re done with the math now. Hopefully, though, you can see how weak data can completely derail a great direct marketing campaign, and cause you to basically just flush money down the drain.
Now, I want to stress that an inaccurate address is not necessarily an undeliverable address. Accuracy is measured by means of automated comparisons against a Canada Post master file. And an address that may be deemed inaccurate through this process could be correctly interpreted by a postal worker, resulting in the eventual delivery of the piece (though possibly with delays).
Having already seen the negative influence that bad data can have, however, do you really want to take the chance and hope that your pieces with inaccurate address data might get delivered? I certainly wouldn’t.
Given all of this, it’s incredibly alarming that, in some cases, we have seen a blatantly blase attitude towards data. Some marketers just seem to think that, as long as all information exists somewhere on the database, that everything will just fall into place. That’s just not the case. It’s like opening a box of IKEA furniture, throwing all the unassembled pieces into a pile and somehow expecting it to magically pull itself together. And that, of course, is assuming that all of the necessary information is actually present. It becomes even more of an issue when key address information is simply missing.
Fortunately, as noted in Monday’s post Say Good-Bye to Inaccurate Data, Canadian mailers now have a solid line of defense against stale and inaccurate data with Canada Post’s Smart Data Cleaner services. Additionally, for those that need help, vendors such as ourselves are available to assist with formatting data into acceptable Canada Post formats as well as integrating updated data back into client databases.
For quite sometime now, we at Highland Marketing have been telling our clients and associates that the two keys to successful direct marketing are good creative and good data. It’s not an either/or kind of scenario. Both of these need to be present and accounted for. Yet, it seems that the bulk of the attention keeps falling on the side of the creative.
Hopefully, this article has shown the fundamental problem with this way of thinking, illustrated how weak data can actually kill even the best creative, and motivated you to take a closer look at the accuracy of your own mailing file!
Further Resources
After all of this discussion, we certainly don’t want to leave you worrying about your data, without offering some resources for helping to improve it. To start, we have written some other blog entries that focus on data:
- Say Good-Bye to Inaccurate Data
- Good Planning, Good Data, Good Results
- Being Creative with Variable Print
- 5 Reasons to Seed Yourself
We have also prepared several resource documents that can help instruct you in both the basics as well as some of the finer points of working with data
Finally, if you are unsure as to the current state of your data, we are also offering a free, no risk assessment of your Canadian mailing data. Please feel free to contact us to take advantage of this offer.
