BPiF prides itself on working with green marketing campaigns, which is always a good thing. However, as we have discovered here, this only works if companies keep their data up to date. In an office of 5 employees, we received a total of 6 identical magazines, one of which had no addressee and two of which were for employees who haven’t worked here for almost a year. The costs involved in BPiF printing and posting all of these extra copies of their magazine must be pretty significant if you assume that other offices around the country have the same problem with extra copies.

A quick phone call from us was all it took to tell BPiF of their error, but wouldn’t it make more sense both in terms of customer engagement and clean data for BPiF to make more effort to ensure their data is correct? Although I’ve talked about BPiF here as an illustration, I can only imagine that many many companies have the same issues!

Here at Mulberry Square, our marketing consultancy services place absolute priority on commissioning a data audit for new clients. This ensures that their data is clean, up to date and therefore any marketing strategy that we subsequently implement is as cost effective and efficient as possible.

Absolute madness… How can a business be so irresponsible and make such a fatal error? They might as well have done a KLF – set fire to the money - and profited from the publicity.

If you are in the business of mail order and home shopping then it is surely imperative to ensure that each and every name on your database is a potential purchaser. Even the postage alone does not come cheap. Then when you consider the production costs of a printed item, you are looking at a minimum of £10,000 wasted on 30,000 duff names.

Obviously, the solution would have been to run a suppression on the data, which would have cost up to 40p each but at least there would have been the chance to make a claim against the supplier of the list, not mail those names more than once, deal with the returns from the Royal Mail or have to deal with the elimination of the names in the aftermath.

If your organisation has not had a health check on its mailing list for 12 months then I suggest that you raise it with your marketing service provider who can do what your list managers should already be doing for you.

Mulberry Square can offer to run a mailing list health check for you as well as a comparison on the price that you are paying for your print, mailing and postage. We have many years of experience to offer in this field and would welcome the opportunity.