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A guide for fundraisers to the thorny issue of direct marketing compliance

By |2018-11-06T10:40:41+00:00September 28th, 2016|

Fundraising is the lifeblood of any charitable organisation. Without it the organisation ceases to exist. However, it has never been harder for fundraisers to raise money. Donation levels are down but the number of registered charities is rising. Competition is fierce and marketing is one of the most effective ways of building brand and cause awareness which has a proven correlation with donation levels. The problem is that marketing itself is a minefield. Seemingly every week a new proposal or legislative framework is mooted making it extremely difficult to keep track of what is and isn’t allowed. FPS, The Digital Economy Bill, GDPR and a new ICO are just a few of the issues charity marketers are currently facing – [...]

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Lean DM – Focus on Name and Address Quality

By |2017-01-11T21:55:58+00:00August 25th, 2016|

Have you ever received a piece of mail, taken a glance at the address block and had to double take? Something doesn’t look quite right. A company asking you to spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds has just written to you as Mrs Ian Wilson rather than Mr Ian Wilson. Although deep down you know this is most likely an administration error, you can’t help but feel a little slighted. It also begs the question ‘if they can’t even get my name right, what is the experience going to be like dealing with them if I became a customer?’. 70% of consumers expect their data to be right every time. DataIQ – GDPR Identifying its impact on marketers and [...]

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Sixty Percent of Marketers Shun Reverse Marketing Costing £145 Million Per Year

By |2017-01-11T22:07:51+00:00August 11th, 2016|

A new study by The Software Bureau reveals that 60 per cent of marketers do not practice reverse marketing; the management of direct mail returns, which costs firms £4.02 per returned piece of mail. Approximately 90 million pieces of direct mail (2.5 per cent) are returned to sender each year. Forty percent of these or 36 million are returned due to the recipient’s wish to be removed from the marketing database equating to a loss of potential revenue of £116 million and £29 million in wasted production costs. Reverse marketing enables organisations to compile in-house do not mail lists that can be screened against future campaigns reducing the volume of mistargeted mailings, saving money and improving the reputation of the [...]

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Lean DM – Focus on Goneaway and Deceased Suppression

By |2017-01-11T22:10:53+00:00August 10th, 2016|

Around 1.5 million people move house each year and over 500,000 people unfortunately pass away. This level of constant change can lead to data decaying at rates of over 30% per year for some organisations. The Office of National Statistics estimate up to 110 items of mail can be sent to the deceased in the 12 months after their death. Sending mail to people who have died or moved house is more than just a waste of printing and postage costs. When a business chooses to send mail without removing these recipients the only message being communicated is ‘the brand does not care about its customers’. Relatives of the deceased or new occupants are of course highly likely to see [...]

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Mailmark drives increased interest in direct mail

By |2017-01-12T14:25:29+00:00December 21st, 2015|

Direct mail has experienced a significant spike in interest and take-up in the last three months. That’s according to market analysis, sales figures and incoming leads from data quality and hygiene firm The Software Bureau. The Software Bureau cites two main contributing factors for this growth: the cost reduction in postage offered by Mailmark and a reduction of client confidence in digital display advertising. Mailmark was introduced by Royal Mail 18 months ago with the aim of making advertising mail more accountable. It is also now the most cost effective way to send bulk mail. In January 2016 a new price differential for Mailmark will be introduced making it up to 5% cheaper than other postage solutions. The Software Bureau [...]

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Is ‘preference’ a Dirty word?

By |2017-01-12T14:39:25+00:00November 10th, 2015|

For years there have been rumblings about various industry-wide consumer preference services giving  consumers the chance to select (or deselect) channels, sectors and even specific brands they want to hear from. Such movements always provoke mass debate. Justin Basini’s Allow and REaD Group’s Itsmypost.com were two such initiatives that are no longer in existence. Is this because they didn’t work? Or perhaps because opposition from marketers was too strong to ignore? Why have these initiatives failed to gain traction? The question today is were these frontrunners onto something but just a little before their time? One argument against them was that the industry as a collective didn’t approve of any individual company profiting from their perceived misery, which is how many viewed [...]

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Digital’s loss will be DM’s gain: but only if we’re honest

By |2017-01-12T14:42:27+00:00September 22nd, 2015|

When even WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell admits that something might be up with a medium, you’d be a fool not to take heed. He recently added his tuppence worth into the furore surrounding digital advertising sparked by research from PageFair and Adobe that revealed up to £50bn might be wiped off global digital ad spend next year. To add to the medium’s woes, a separate study from Meetrics estimated that £485m worth of online ads had never been seen as a result of glitches in programmatic buying. While this is highly unlikely to be armageddon for online advertising, such damning statistics will inevitably have some clients running scared and online budgets will resultantly experience shrinkage – two Bellwether Report’s [...]

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