The pace of change in direct marketing is happening at a rate that is confounding everyone.  Marketers are being forced to implement campaigns quicker than ever before, using new channels, on tighter budgets, yet all the while delivering ROI at record levels! Something’s got to give and it’s often data.  Jed Mooney, Managing Director at Datahold explains more.

In the good old days of direct mail list rental, clients would have to wait at least a week to receive their rented list data.  Today, such a practice would lead to the death of the list industry as it stands.

Why?  Quick data turnaround and rapid fulfilment of data orders is absolutely critical to modern direct marketing planning and campaign management.  It’s not just postal data either.  Email campaigns and telemarketing campaigns are just two examples of other direct media channels that demand data quickly.

What’s driven this process is the shortened time frame of direct marketing campaigns.  Three-month lead times, the typical length of an Eighties or Nineties campaign, are no longer viable. In its place are campaigns that demand rapid turnaround in terms of planning, creative, printing, lettershop and also data delivery.

In such a speeded-up direct marketing environment, slow data delivery can lead to costly budget overruns as printing slots are missed, email broadcasts are delayed and call centres grind to a halt waiting for cleaned telephone data.

This need for rapid data turnaround is also made more acute due to data orders falling short on volume due to higher than expected duplication rates.  In such a scenario, new list orders are urgently needed to replace the lost data volumes.

For these reasons, rapid data turnaround of lists is proving critical in the modern direct marketing environment.  Moreover, this data needs to be of the highest quality and cleaned to exceptional standards not only for best practice purposes but also to uphold ROI and minimise wastage.

If a supplier cannot be relied upon to produce data orders correctly and quickly, they are often excluded from being used irrespective of the anticipated responsiveness of their data.

All the signs are therefore pointing towards a new generation of data bureau that will have to provide increasingly rapid data turnaround.  This is a tough call - one that demands data output within a few hours and overnight turnaround as a minimum requirement.  However, the data rental industry is facing no other option than to meet these new client demands.

Source: Precision Marketing Magazine
ByLine: Jed Mooney, Managing Director, Datahold
Publication Date: 14 Jul 2008