Over the years, our industry has regularly been hauled over the coals for an offensive or profane word slipping through the net and ending up replacing the name of the intended addressee, and then being printed and mailed. This has recently happened with a Tesco Clubcard campaign, as you may have heard in the news, where a rather ‘descriptive’ phrase was used in replacement of the genuine recipient’s name. Click the link if you dare, or you can Google it of course (Other search engines are available) to satisfy your curiosity. Unsurprisingly, the press took great glee in publicising it and the social media posts drew the usual negative ‘junk mail’ comments from those with an agenda about our industry.  As those of us who have been in the industry for a number of years are aware, this type of incident has unfortunately occurred numerous times over the years. [...]

Lockdown was a difficult time for all of us, and we hope all our clients managed to get through the period without too much difficulty or disruption. We know that mail volumes were significantly down on the same period the previous year, and especially with advertising mail. Business mail however held up reasonably well in comparison, with a relatively small reduction in volume. Despite these falling volumes though, interaction with mail received through the door rose to record levels. What was both interesting and encouraging, was that this growth was particularly strong with advertising mail and door drops. This means that physical mail maintains a very important position in the marketing mix. JICMAIL has undertaken some exhaustive research in this [...]

We instinctively know that good quality, clean data is likely to lead to better marketing results. What has always been difficult to pin down is exactly what impact data quality has on the bottom line. However, in recent research conducted by Jim Conning’s Data Services team at Royal Mail and DataIQ it has been revealed poor quality contact data is costing organisations a staggering 5.9% of turnover on average. To put this into context, the average large business in the UK turns over £291m so the cost of poor quality contact data for a large business is running at £17.2m annually. The same survey of 272 marketers also found quality of contact data to have the highest impact on campaign [...]