Thursday, July 2, 2015

Costly Bad-Address Returns Still Plague Mailers

With advances in data technology and systems offered by the U.S. Postal Service, such as National Change of Address, direct mailers should have seen a decline in "return to sender" address glitches in recent years. Not so, points out Direct Marketing News magazine Senior Editor Al Urbanski in a recent article. In fact, according to USPS figures, 3.7% of first-class mail was returned to senders in 2014, up from the 3.4% in 2004. That small percentage adds up to big costs for direct mailers. Urbanski cites estimates by Novitex, a mail management company, that each piece of returned mail costs marketers between $3 and $50 a piece, with the higher hit on transactional mailers receiving payments for insurance premiums, merchandise purchases, credit card payments, and loan payments. But all mailers are burdened by wasted printing, prep, postage and data processing spends, as well as customer churn and lost opportunities. What to do? The fundamental problem is bad mailing-list data, despite all the systems available to keep lists clean and updated. So Novitex urges using automated services for address updating, including NCOA; centralized returned mail operations to improve reaction and cut risk of postal service audits and lost discounts; and implementation of data technology to track mail behavior to the root causes of returns. For the complete article: http://www.dmnews.com/direct-line-blog/return-to-sender-is-still-high-on-mailers-playlists/article/421022/

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Marketers Embrace 2015 Spending, Including Mail

Direct marketers have finally left behind recession-inspired cautionary spending, with many in a "full-steam growth mode," per Target Marketing magazine's "2015 Media Usage Survey." And the good news for direct mail data professionals like AccuList USA is that direct mail retains a key role in media budgets. Per the survey, about 44% of business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers reported that their media budgets are staying the same as in 2014, with 32% increasing spending and only 12% planning a budget decrease. Where are they spending? Most respondents (65%) are increasing e-mail spending, and most respondents (61%) plan to increase social media engagement investments in 2015. Search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO) also both continue as high priorities, especially for acquisition, so that content marketing, video and mobile optimization—each offering strong search benefits—were cited as high priorities, too. However, snail mail is still a critically important channel for most direct marketers. Overall, 30% plan to increase mail budgets and 37% will keep spending the same compared with last year. More than half are still using direct mail for both acquisition and retention. Yes, 11% of respondents reported decreasing direct mail budgets, but, as Target Marketing sums up in its report, that doesn't mean direct mail is withering away but that "newer strategies are factoring into the direct marketing equation, and its share is being spread around to other corners of the media landscape." For more detail, read http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/target-marketings-media-usage-survey-2015/