Data Therapy: Walksorting the dead - The Supplier's View

Cutting data hygiene measures seems like an obvious way to save money in a recession. But suppression is not just an overhead, it also drives positive dimension of a company's marketing.

THE ISSUE

Unintended consequences face all of us if we treat data without caution. Research is an obvious example. Conclusions drawn on sampling of a given population can all too easily be skewed, exaggerates or simply only applicable in a specific set of circumstances. Just ask Coco-Cola, the victims of the most famous mis-reading of a research finding ever.

Suppression data has suffered from a similar problem as the Coke v New Coke taste-off, except with the results in reverse. Sometime in the mid-1990s, Royal Mail carried out an exercise in which it mailed a sample of households which it had flagged as goneaways. The mailing got a response rate which any commercial marketing campaign would have found acceptable. 

Since then, data users have taken this as evidence of the risk of over-suppression. Yet the Royal Mail research should have told us something very valuable - that before deciding whether to suppress, you first need to decide on the definition of a goneaway and also whether the status of the individual, rather than the household, really matters to you. 

Ever since the suppression data market got going in the mid-1990s, there has been a hotly-contested argument over postal versus actual goneaways. The first of these is simply an item on which somebody was written "Return to Sender". The second is a confirmed customer telling a supplier that they have moved. 

So the source of goneaway data is critical, yet often obscured in multi-source suppression files. Deceased data ought to be more absolute, but can be [probe to mis-reporting, even if to a lesser degree. Whether the data user cares about these level of accuracies is a more challenging issue. Nearly a third of all direct mail activity is still applying basic suppression, according to some studies. Those companies could argue that they do not want to remove individuals who might still be in a residence or alive (no doubt citing the Royal Mail finings from its goneaway mailing as proof). 

This can be positioned as putting the interests of those individuals first. It is fact the opposite - giving response rates preference over best practice. So how can suppression data make the case that it should not only be used, but applied with discretion?

THE SUPPLIER'S VIEW

Richard Anderson
Sales Director, REaD UK

At the risk of sounding like a complete heretic, I'm no great fan of the 'S word' - suppression. Perhaps the new Dr Who can travel back to the early Nineties and rename the process of identifying gone-away and deceased customers/prospects as something a little more, well... positive. To me it's always been a means to leveraging the greatest insight and ROI possible from data - not just removing records.

First let me tackle that hoary old chestnut: 'why suppress? "Yes, the Royal Mail experience of fifteen years ago which David cites indeed saw an unsuppressed mailing to goneaways generate a commercially viable response rate. But what was the nature of the offer? And what was the volume?" If I had sufficient budget, I could simply carpet bomb entire regions and, if my offer was sufficiently attractive, probably achieve an effective response rate. "But along the way, I'd have needlessly spent several hundred thousand quid."

Sound familiar? That was what dumb, unsuppressed and, dare I say, unsophisticated direct mail was like. But then the public became alarmed at senselessly using the equivalent of 4 million trees per year and nigh on every major brand scrambled to appear green. The estimated £50 million that misaddressed and discarded DM items cost UK businesses annually began to receive press attention. Then finally, and most recently, the recession has left everyone grappling with new rules and game plans. 

Replacing this "bigger, faster, more" ethos are client retention strategies, brand loyalty, response rates and ROI.  

But powering these activities is data - the cleaner, accurate and secure the better. And suppression remains customer and prospect data's best friend.  

Look at the issue of over-suppression. In the worst case scenario, otherwise marketable name and address records can be inadvertently suppressed. So pre-clean data segmentation is incredibly important. Similar problems can also arise when using deceased suppression products which contain a sizable amount of unverified information.

To my mind, the four most important criteria to look at when choosing are accuracy, recency, coverage and price. Wherever possible try to ensure that all of the suppression files you're using contain only verified and non-assumed data.

Recency is also becoming an important selection criterion. Suppression files which take months to compile and update may impair your response rates. Don't constrain your marcoms strategy by using suppression files with anything less than the maximum coverage available. Otherwise you won't be playing with a full data deck, so to speak.

And finally, there's that old suppression devil - price. Once again, "pick 'n mix" files may look like cheaper, viable options. But the additional costs you'll incur by needlessly marketing to customers who have moved, died or simply aren't interested in your offer will cost you infinitely more in terms of brand damage and/or lost sales.

Continue reading Part 2 of Data Therapy: Walksorting the dead - The Client's View

This artcile originally featured in the August 2009 edition of Data Strategy