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61% of Marketers Increased Direct Mail Automation Investment in 2024

By |2024-07-23T11:19:50+00:00July 23rd, 2024|

Recent research by SeQuel Response reveals 61% of marketers increased their investments in direct mail automation over the past year​. This trend underscores the transformative power of automation in enhancing the efficiency, personalisation, and effectiveness of direct mail campaigns. Here are six ways automation is enhancing direct mail: Optimised Personalisation Through Data-Driven Insights The era of generic mail pieces is over; now, campaigns are leveraging sophisticated algorithms to analyse customer data, tailoring messages to individual preferences and behaviours. This approach involves more than just addressing recipients by name—it’s about creating content and offers that resonate deeply with each unique recipient. The result is a significant boost in response rates and customer engagement, driven by the precise alignment of marketing messages [...]

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84% of ecommerce marketers say Direct Mail delivers best ROI

By |2024-07-16T13:07:42+00:00July 16th, 2024|

According to a new report by Lob, 84% of ecommerce brand marketers agree that direct mail delivers the best ROI, response rate, and conversion rates compared to all other channels, a notable increase from 74% in 2023. The value of direct mail marketing for the eCommerce industry continues to grow, with 85% of marketers in the sector affirming that it offers the best ROI of any channel their organisation uses. An impressive 91% also agree that it delivers the best response rates. Increased Investment and Automation Reflecting this resurgence, 82% have said that they have increased their budget allocation for direct mail, up from 58% in 2023. The adoption of direct mail automation platforms has also seen a significant rise, [...]

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Cost of Dirty Data: The £900 Billion Annual Burden on UK Business

By |2023-11-14T10:23:03+00:00November 14th, 2023|

Dirty data is costing the UK economy £900 billion. The impact of unclean data is estimated to stand at 20% of an organisation’s revenue. In 2023 revenue of UK business is thought to total £4.5 trillion meaning that failing to keep customer data up-to-date cost £900bn. In terms of the impact of this on individual businesses, a single ‘inaccurate’ customer record is currently costs an organisation £81.11. Experian research reveals that 22% of customer records within the average database are inaccurate. This means that an organisation with a database comprising 500,000 customer records could be looking at a £811,000 cost to the business. The retail sector was found to have the highest associated cost of unclean data at £300bn, whilst [...]

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Keeping Pace with AI Ethics

By |2023-09-08T12:13:43+00:00September 8th, 2023|

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives, from voice assistants to recommendation systems and autonomous vehicles. Its transformative power has brought both remarkable advancements and profound ethical dilemmas. Recent calls from MPs urging the Prime Minister to pass new legislation for AI safety in the UK, before the EU takes the lead, have brought the spotlight back onto the importance of AI ethics and the critical role data hygiene plays in ensuring safe AI systems. The Call for AI Safety Legislation MPs are sounding an alarm, warning that the UK risks falling behind in the global AI race if comprehensive AI safety legislation is not put in place promptly. The European Union is poised to establish [...]

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Data processing security is key data concern for 2023

By |2023-07-11T13:01:31+00:00July 11th, 2023|

Our latest review of the GDPR enforcements undertaken by the ICO over the past 12 months reveals that data processing security and right of access are the most common infringements since July 2022. Almost a third (30 per cent) of the 30 recorded infringements this year pertained to Article 5, the principles relating to data processing and of these 21 per cent were for Article 5 (f) which specifies that personal data must be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security. Sixteen per cent contravened Article 15: Right of Access by the data subject and 15 per cent were non-compliant to Article 12 (data transparency) and Article 32 (security of processing). Last year the lion’s share of enforcements (61 [...]

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Has MOVEit made you think more seriously about data governance?

By |2023-06-19T13:04:59+00:00June 19th, 2023|

If not, it should and here’s why As the days roll by it is becoming increasingly clear that the MOVEit vulnerability which was discovered earlier this month is having very, very far-reaching repercussions. A growing list of UK companies have been affected by the cyberattack on payroll service provider Zellis, which occurred via one of its third-party suppliers (Moveit), this has resulted in hundreds of thousands of staff members at these organisations having their personal information posted on the dark web. The hack was first made public when US-based firm Progress Software identified that hackers had discovered a method of breaking into its MOVEit Transfer tool, a widely used software which enables users to move files from one place to [...]

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Streamlining Data Quality: The Rise of Fully Automated Data Cleansing Services

By |2023-05-17T11:45:39+00:00May 17th, 2023|

In today's data-driven world, businesses rely heavily on the accuracy and reliability of their data to make informed decisions. However, maintaining clean and error-free data is a complex and time-consuming task that can often overwhelm organisations. To address this challenge, a new solution has emerged: fully automated data cleansing services. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies, these services streamline the data cleaning process, enabling businesses to enhance the quality of their data effortlessly and efficiently. The Challenge of Data Quality: Data quality is a crucial factor in ensuring reliable business operations, insightful analytics, and effective decision-making. Organisations often encounter challenges such as duplicate entries, outdated information, inconsistent formatting, and incomplete records. These issues can stem from various sources, including manual data entry, system [...]

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Direct mail now more measurable than email!

By |2023-04-17T15:24:44+00:00April 17th, 2023|

Direct mail is now as measurable (if not more so, according to JICMAIL) than digital campaigns. For the first time JICMAIL has assessed how responsive UK householders are to direct mail incorporating key metrics such as response rates for acquisition and retention-based mail marketing campaigns, ROI, CPA and AOV. These are available for the retail, finance and insurance, medical and charity sectors. The study found that organisations using direct mail can expect benchmark response rates of almost 11 per cent for warm direct mail, which is defined as mail received by people who are known to be customers. Whilst a response rate of one per cent is received for cold mail, which is considered to be mail sent to people [...]

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Zero trust and the role of data hygiene 

By |2023-02-27T16:21:38+00:00February 27th, 2023|

Massive amounts of data are being generated daily - from exercise stats compiled by wearables through to smart building monitors that collect temperature and air pressure information every 15 minutes. If data creation continues at its present rate, more than a yottabyte (a million trillion megabytes) will likely be generated annually by 2030. We are really starting to put the big into big data!  But with data, comes data threat. The two are synonymous. Last year it is estimated that there were 4,100 publicly announced breaches in security equating to 22 billion records being compromised and a rise of over 25 percent is expected this year. In an attempt to mitigate these threats, it is unsurprising that within three years Gartner [...]

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Charities need to focus on inspiring positive emotions as cost-of-living crisis starts to bite

By |2022-12-19T14:09:24+00:00November 29th, 2022|

The cost-of-living crisis is really beginning to show its teeth when it comes to charitable donations. According to the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) UK Giving Report nearly 60 percent of respondents said that the crisis will negatively impact their ability to donate. In April, one in 25 people reported that they had already cancelled a regular donation to charity, and by October this had risen to one in ten as a direct response to the rising cost of living. Similarly, 1 in 12 people said they had chosen not to make a one-off donation whilst a large number also said they had reviewed how much they give to charity. Due to this less than rosy outlook, many charities are shifting [...]

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