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.