Tony Attwood’s Blog

Each day I take a small number of calls from people who tell me about their marketing, and who ask me to suggest what else they might do, or how they might change what they are doing in order to up their profits.

It’s part of the work I really enjoy, because each company is, of course, unique. There’s no charge for the service and there’s no obligation on the caller to become a customer of ours, nor for them to take any notice of my comments (although fortunately for me some of them do become clients as a result of the chat.)

Anyway, since the start of the year I have been recording the subjects we have talked about - and three topics come up over and over again. I thought I’d break away from the daily round of comments about how the industry is growing and what Postcomm are doing, and look instead at these three areas. Here’s the first one….

….which is database.

Databases are considered rather dull by many firms. They are there, but not really used - very few people who call me actually handle the wretched thing themselves.

But tweaking the database can, in many cases raise profits considerably. For a small investment many firms have been able to double their response rates.

What happens is that someone (we offer to do it, but the company can do it themselves if they wish) needs to analyse the mailing list that has been used against the orders coming in.

So, to take a simple example - imagine you are selling to accountants. You have a list of 10,000 accountants who you mail from time to time. 1% of them reply each time. An analysis of the master list and the buyers might turn up this interesting stat: 10% of accountancy firms on the list have over 10 staff, but 50% of the purchases are made by firms with over 10 staff.

This can have all sorts of implications. It can mean that one has to send something different to the little firms. It can mean that one needs to mail the smaller firms less, and the bigger firms more. Whatever it means, it is true that the mailer could cut the mailing costs by 90% but still retain 50% of the sales - which would mean a huge hike in profits although a downturn in turnover.

Another interesting approach with a database is to analyse it against a recognised master list. Again taking accountants, this could be put against the standard Thompson list, and the results might show that 30% of the addresses are wrong (that is they have gone away and are perhaps being forwarded from a previous address), 10% are duplicated, 15% have the wrong postcode (and so are not getting full mailsort discount), 5% of which are not accountancy firms at all. 40% might have phone numbers of faxes missing, 30% might have the wrong employee size, and so on and on.

The implication is that if one can sort all this out, the cost of each mailing is going to go down. There is actually no cost for doing this sort of analysis - although there is a charge for making the corrections.

What is so interesting is that most firms that use databases do so without undertaking any of these analysis - the lists just get older and no one really checks how good the lists are, or whether it is necessary to change the list, or just mail part of it. I guess because it all seems to be too much of a difficult task to look at - and there is always something else to do!

I’ll move on to the second topic shortly - but in the meantime if you want to have a chat about any aspect of your direct marketing, do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings plc reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.