A good Direct Mail Returns Management Service (RMS) can be a very useful tool to assess the success or failure of any marketing campaign,
Direct mail has been responsible for getting the message across in some fantastic marketing campaigns. However, a campaign only has the possibility of becoming a success if it is seen by the addressee and crucially the correct target audience. If that audience has moved then the marketing material that you might have spent days or weeks working on will not be seen, except possibly by the postman who will see it twice – once on delivery and once on return!
Imagine that your marketing campaign has failed.. not only will you have spent a lot of money on it and have a very poor response rate to boot, but you will questioning how and why this could have happened. One of the key elements to be examined will be your data. Ask yourself, how good was the data used? What could I have omitted mailing so that this was more successful?
Sharp Cat can help you to create a solid, valued direct mailing audience by using direct returns data.
We have always promoted the idea that building trust with your mailing audience, allowing them to easily opt in or out of your database should be a priority. We have a dedicated website for this purpose www.mailoptout.co.uk. Take a look! Demonstrating on the envelope that removal is easy is just one way to ensure that trust. The days of sending out massive mailing campaigns to anyone on a database is to end in March 2018 with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR).
All mail that is returned to Sharp Cat is counted and recorded for our clients as a free service. With your permission that information is data captured and held securely so that it can be used as a suppression file on any future mailing campaigns you might do with us. We understand that IT departments in companies are very busy and suppressing a set of data from a large Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system could take several weeks so we offer this buffer built into our own RMS. We will supply your returns data, free of charge, to you on a monthly basis so that you can remove the relevant information from your own database. With your data cleaned you will know that the addresses that you are reaching out to will be the intended audience. Further, once GDPR is in place a good RMS will be even more important since any inclusion of an address which had previously asked to be removed from a database could create a major financial issue for your organisation.
Sharp Cat’s RMS will undoubtedly save you money – you will be able to see the value of returned data immediately. If you take into account the creative design, print and postage costs of wasted mailings the savings really do add up.
Some Live examples
