Direct Mail Can Still Be a Profitable Marketing Tool

March 1, 2013 - PRLog -- Direct mail or direct response marketing is one of the simplest communication tools that can either be an expensive, inefficient exercise, or the most cost-effective lead generated tool that will drive profit for your organisation.

However, Nixies or “undeliverable-by-post office” mail is a significant and difficult problem to solve for companies. Nixie mail has a direct impact on the success rate of a campaign and holds serious implications for collections, as customers deem not receiving a statement as a reason to withhold payment of instalments.

An end-to-end solution: Automated Address Validation (AAV), was developed by Effective Intelligence to support operational and mail services by decreasing an expensive and time-consuming problem; your Nixie mail. According to Julian Ardagh, CEO of Effective Intelligence, the benefits of AAV contribute directly to the success of cost savings of collections, client services and marketing, with real cost savings of R569 672 in one file, within one month of implementation, for one client.

The automated, Web-based application identifies and corrects mail prior to sending and provides a tracking report to measure success of pre-cleaning the data. AAV employs address quality checking within a mail data management system that will identify, standardise, check and correct, and separate the ‘good’ from potentially futile addresses. AAV includes a user management interface and reporting system that includes real-time visual mapping to identify and display problem addresses.

The self-contained application-based solution encourages long-term data quality improvements by enhancing addresses with each mail run and generate process summary reports per file, saving time since users no longer have to manually open transaction files to get or calculate totals. To further improve business decisioning, AAV reports on failed mailings against your post office rejection reasons.

AAV, built on solid Java technology is unobtrusive, with minimal human intervention required and will not hinder current business processes. Once a schedule and template is created, AAV will continue to perform unaided.