Before B2B101 takes a much deserved seasonal break, just one last chance to mix a metaphor, splatter a split infinitive and trample on a few more turkeys.
Blogging on Brand Republic is good fun, and the grossly inflated production team at B2B101 (That’s me, 36 hours after the Christmas party) would like to thank Bill Britt and everyone at BP for making this possible.
Hopefully, more of the industry will discover the blogs and forums next year, and increase the levels of activity. I certainly hope so.
My only concern is that most DM gatherings of any note happen around a bar and Bill is dithering over delivering a bottle of virtual Bolly for some strange reason.
So, dear reader, it is time to exchange seasonal greetings. May your God go with you, as Dave Allen used to say, and may Arsenal win the premiership, England’s cricket team get back to winning ways and Golden Brown pluck up the courage to seek a mandate from the electorate before it is too late.
See you on the 7th January.
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Now we are losing hard drives in Iowa, and HMRC owns up to losing another 6500 record file. Government ministers are putting nervous heads above the parapets to confess to yet another data disaster almost every day. Golden Brown should declare an amnesty and get it all out of the way. An appearance in front of Paxman could be seen as penance.
No point in raking over it all again, of course. I just wonder when it is all going to end. If Mr Bean is still considering a national identity scheme, he is going to be laughed out of parliament.
Just a suggestion, Prime Minister, but why don’t you stand up and admit that data handling procedures throughout your many government departments are old-fashioned, insecure and inadequate? Promise to get it sorted, set a deadline and do it.
I know you struggle with the third bit of that, but just try. This drip-drip-drip of disaster is doing no one any good – least of all you.
Along with Santa Claus, who is off sick this week, Lord Lucan, and the Tooth Fairy as we all debate the huge range of prices in B2B data and wonder if they are representative of huge variations in quality.
Reading the trade press is always interesting of course. My copy of ‘another’ magazine arrived at home last Friday and I leapt on it with great enthusiasm, as always.
There was an interesting article on B2B data, with the usual rent-a-quotes (of which I am sometimes one, so that is not intended to be a derogatory allusion) debating the balance of price and quality. Unfortunately, no one answered the question.
Let me tell you the main reason that prices vary so much, first of all. It is because not all the data on the market is very good. Some suppliers are painting coal gold and then selling it like baked beans. Others have ripped some data off from somewhere and doing much the same thing.
Yes, ripped off is a euphemism for stolen. No allegedly here, I can refer you to the court cases, should you really be interested.
Reputable suppliers, with real costs to cover, try to keep prices sensible, but then you come up against one of the other lot, and you are in low double figures per thousand.
Now, that is a free market economy for you. The customer must make his choice, and we must each decide how low we are prepared to go, but that is where the low prices come from.
Of course this impacts on quality, because quality adds cost. Many suppliers cut costs to compete – and that is just as true of the big boys as it is of the smaller suppliers. For every client that shops around and drives someone down to £40 per thousand, the pressures on quality increase. Many suppliers add value to their data, in many different ways, but one thing that always adds is cost.
Some of the clichés in the article are as obvious as they are meaningless. Of course ‘customers need to be careful about what they are buying’. Of course ‘the essence of what you are selling and the medium you are going to use, as well as who you are hoping to target, will also affect the kind of data you need’. Of course lots of the emails available on the market are generic. Good grief, I feel another chorus of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ breaking out in the sales office.
The facts are that B2B data is mostly matched and estimated. Most suppliers match Companies House data with some directory data. There are more sources, to add more depth, but that is the core. Small percentages of the entire universe are then telephoned by someone. Core selections such as employee numbers and turnover are estimated. Some models are applied, to identify propensity in certain areas, but it is not exactly a clear picture.
The packages that can demand prices of £200 per thousand plus are sold more on brand than data quality, because the same fallible core is at the centre of it all.
Before Lord Lucan starts foaming at the mouth again, let me end with one last double quote from this article in Data Strategy magazine. “A client should only pay for quality business records and any invalids should always be credited’ and ‘List owners need to take more stringent steps with their data to ensure that it is managed in a way that will give it longevity, rather than constantly over-burning their data for short-term profit’.
No one can guarantee no invalids, to use the term quoted. No one. For a start, how do you define invalid? By contact, by job title, by the telephone number being wrong, by the address being incorrect? That is why the industry sets an acceptable tolerance at around 95%. Even that is necessarily covered in terms and conditions. And I am yet to meet a reputable list owner who does not take stringent steps to ensure longevity, but in the short-term we need some profits to invest in data quality.
Buying data is like buying a car. You can buy a Rolls Royce, a Porsche, a Volvo or a Trabant. It depends what suits your needs. If you buy the Roller, you don’t expect many quibbles over a few minor problems – they will sort out any snags FOC. If you buy the Porsche, you have opted for speed but you know the thing will need a bit of maintenance and some tender loving care, which might cost you even more. If you buy the Volvo, you are expecting reliability and safety over time. If you buy the Trabant you need your head examined.
If the manufacturers are forced to compete at Trabant prices by a variety of market factors, quality heads for the lowest common denominator.
In case you are in any doubt, I drive a Volvo J
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Under a headline ‘The junk mail vultures who robbed a widow of life savings’ Andrew Levy in the Daily Mail managed to hammer another nail in the coffin of public opinion against our industry. Let us rise up and smite him together…
Mrs Rita Hopkins was apparently hounded by hundreds of letters and telephone calls all aimed at getting her to hand over her savings to various scams, according to Mr Levy on Thursday December 13th.
Suffering from dementia, she lost £35,000. I am sure everyone in the DM industry will be just as angry as Mr Levy. However, my feelings for Mrs Hopkins were clouded by dismay at the terminology used within the article.
To call this sort of activity ‘junk’ mail is unfair, because this same newspaper has been vociferous in castigating legitimate marketing activities under the same name. Poorly targeted, unsolicited marketing contact is often many things – annoying, bad for the environment etc – but I do not think it is responsible to deliberately link DM with criminal activity.
The people concerned were criminals and charlatans, for sure, but they were looking for prey, not customers. Have a witch hunt against DM if you like, Mr Levy, but try and retain just a hint of objectivity.
Remember we buy newspapers too.
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What’s the name of the game? Does it mean anything to you? One of the great lyrics in the history of Anglo-Scandinavian pop, and an increasing truism in B2B DM, methinks. Desks count, names don’t, because people move but the responsibilities of office do not go away.
According to some research I found on the CIPD web site, dated August 2007, UK staff retention currently sits at around 18.1% per annum. My old friends at Market Monitor, who still provide the best tele-verified B2B data available in the UK today, reckon on verifying names and responsibilities within twelve months.
So, even the best data could be almost 20% inaccurate in this respect. At some stage during the genesis of DM, personalisation became an obsession. Being able to address a letter ‘Dear Hugh’ or ‘Dear Mr Bessant’ seemed to show that we care who is reading it. The thinking was, and is, that getting the name right increases return on investment.
Commonsense should tell anyone that no data is ever 100% accurate. It is impossible to guarantee that nothing has changed between the last update and client usage, and we all aim for 95% deliverable. Because it sounds reasonable.
We are in the business of sowing seeds, and some will always fall on fallow ground, but we live in the hope that ROI will be sufficient to live with the realities of data accuracy. A record is not undeliverable because someone has left the target business. The chances are that someone else will have taken on the responsibilities, and that the envelope will still fall on the right desk.
Now I know that is not perfect, but it is reality. The costs of significantly improving the accuracy of named contacts on any database would be far beyond what the market is prepared to pay.
How important is a postal service in this day and age? Come on, it is a serious question. If the war against junk mail unites with the green lobby and the government to further restrict all forms of DM, on top of the current parlous state of Royal Mail, what are we going to be left with? What do we want, or more importantly, what do we need?
Here in little old Leamington Spa, our post people are very nice. But they are getting later. Karen, our accounts department, is often waiting until almost noon to see if any cheques have arrived, for instance.
Of course, this is no surprise. With 40,000 jobs going the service must be affected. So a lot of things, not just Karen’s routine, are going to have to change.
And this is now, with a reasonable level of door drops and DM filling the sacks. If that drops off, for whatever reason, what’s next? No more daily deliveries? Then DM gets even more difficult, because it will be harder to hit a desk or a letterbox on a certain day and planning goes out of the window.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy IMHO. Someone needs to stop the roundabout and have a debate about what sort of postal service we all want, how much that will cost, and how it is going to be funded. If we don’t do that, it will be a death of a thousand cuts.
And remember, you read it here first.
Everyone wants email addresses, but the data behind them often leaves rather a lot to be desired.
No one should be surprised that electronic direct marketing is increasingly popular. Even if the data costs slightly more, the delivery medium is much cheaper, creative is cheaper, response is easily tracked as well as managed, and according to some research and all popular conceptions ROI is better, too.
In B2B, despite the relatively small amount of data available, bounce backs of 20% and far too many generic addresses of dubious quality, everyone wants to get onboard the bandwagon.
Obviously, like traditional DM, there are good lists and bad lists available. Opt-in processes vary, and therefore, so does quality. You pay your money and you take your choice, as ever. However, as email usage spreads, a new problem is surfacing.
Marketers are buying email data, plus telephone and/or business address details to follow up their email campaigns. I can see the logic in this, but not necessarily the sense. Email is about direct response. Following up with a phone call to see if someone read the message and wants to talk about it, when they have not responded to the email in the first place, is not likely to be the most successful effort ever undertaken.
However, regardless of my opinions of the strategy, the problem is a real one. The issue is this – the data behind most email lists is pretty awful. The fact is that most list owners were so keen to collect emails they concentrated on the opt-in and not the data behind it. The demand for emails was so strong, and the available lists so small, that no one cared about the address and telephone number. Just get it out there. Then major suppliers started licensing data to increase their files, compounding the problem, because different suppliers have different data, methods and objectives.
I am sure that all responsible list owners have tried to rectify the problem, but they have mostly failed. Matching opted-in emails back to the main business universe has not been successful. My own email list is different, but currently quite small. Because it comes from a business directory, the ‘back’ data is all there. No matching is necessary and therefore we can be reasonably confident of data quality going forwards.
This is rare. My advice would be twofold. Firstly, if you are considering an email campaign involving a telephone or postal follow-up, ask yourself why you want to do that. Email is a direct response medium, and you should focus on ROI, making sure that you capture the necessary data on anyone who does respond to your campaign. Secondly, if you decide you do need a telephone or postal follow-up, choose your list carefully and understand, as far as it is possible to ascertain, how the back data is added to the email address. Get some sort of guarantee up front from your supplier on the quality of the back data.
If your supplier does the impression of a plumber giving a quote, lower your expectations.
The Information Commissioner said there was more dirt to come out in the wash. More and more data disasters are sneaking into the news on an almost daily basis. Richard Thomas has told the House of Commons Justice committee that public and private sector bodies are coming forward on ‘a confessional basis.’
Yesterday it was the Northern Ireland Driving License people and Parcelforce owning up to disks being lost in transit, with the details of 7685 vehicles and 6000 vehicle keepers, including names, addresses, registration numbers, chassis numbers, make and colour. And you’ve guessed it, the disks were not encrypted.
Then, in the same news bulletin, whilst still digesting the above with my sandwich, I heard about the Sefton Primary Care Trust ‘accidentally’ sending out details of their staff – dates of birth, NI numbers, salary and pension details – to four businesses bidding for services within the trust.
It does not say how this data was sent, or whether it was encrypted or not, but we can guess, can’t we?
Have these people never heard of FTP sites, or even email? And how do you ‘accidentally’ send staff details to organisations bidding for a contract? The mind boggles
This is getting beyond a joke. The level of incompetence is truly astounding. If these were commercial organisations, Mr Thomas would be imposing fines, and maybe even sending a few senior executives off for a spot of porridge. Our elected representatives are quick to demand best practise of the business community…well, it’s high time they stopped practising (and preaching) and got their act together.
How many more confessions can we expect? Over the weekend, I ditched another blog about Datagate because I assumed the media spotlight would have moved on by now. We can expect a series of reviews and enquiries into these examples of cringing ineptitude, but you know what government enquiries usually find don’t you?
Sweet Fanny Adams, allegedly J
Getting your brand noticed on the web is complicated. Surveys and reports seem to come out every week telling us that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial. Anyone not doing ‘it’ is missing out on potential customers. Then there is the fact that small businesses are being very slow to get into pay-per-click – it seems we all have a lot to learn.
I am just starting to learn about SEO from some experts. The great God Google works in mysterious ways, apparently. Linking into other web sites improves your page rating but repeating the same things doesn’t – a bit of a headache when you are a business directory and companies want to advertise on several different pages.
The major problem is that it sounds expensive and complicated – always a difficult combination for me. I have to confess that I had this down as an even darker art than traditional direct marketing in previous lives. I could not see the value. Now I have a desire for lots of consumer traffic, and real brand visibility, and the subject keeps me awake at night.
Then there is pay-per-click. It is a traffic driver, obviously, but how many small businesses have a web site that truly turns traffic into orders, or can measure the effect to justify the investment to themselves?
Few, I would guess.
SME’s need help, sometimes just to get through the jargon. I have found myself some trusted friends to help me through the minefield, but others may not be so lucky. Making SEO and PPC really fly for small businesses is going to take more education and more simplification before it really takes off.
Multi-national corporations rarely miss a bandwagon, normally out of fear. Environmental issues are a case in point. Seem to be green, or suffer the consequences in the marketplace. This is cynical corporate posturing at its worst.
Once, in my Marcoms days, I spent a year supporting Shelter and galvanising our 1000 strong UK workforce to raise money to match the corporate support. It was fun, and I learned a lot of things along the way, but do not mistake the motive. Our leader at the time was no campaigner for the homeless. He was just miffed that his predecessor got a knighthood, and wanted to earn the same reward.
Being seen to be green is oh so fashionable these days. Everyone is at it, from Sainsburys and their plastic bags through bio-fuel…to Acxiom.
I have just spent an amusing few moments flicking through Head2Head, an Acxiom publication that appeared on my desk unsolicited, in a plastic wrapper. It is all about them being green. Does anyone else see the irony in this?
The publication is promotional, and ‘printed on recycled materials from certified sustainable forests’ by the way. Well, those forests would be a lot more sustainable if they had sent it by email.
I am sure everyone at Acxiom is deadly serious in their desire to be at the forefront of environmental awareness within the direct marketing industry. So am I, as long as it does not deflect everyone from what we are paid to do – which is make a profit.
That does not mean I do not care about the environment. I want polar bears to have enough ice to hunt on as much as the next person, and the idea of East Anglia disappearing under water in the next few years is not at all amusing – but corporations do not share the same values or objectives as individuals, and pretending to do so insults the intelligence of their customers.
Corporations act in the best interests of their shareholders, period. And so they should. Seeming to be green is just a defence mechanism triggered to protect profits in the future.
Individuals will save the environment by insisting that corporations change. Corporations will only really change when they sense that their customers will not make them profitable unless they do.
Cynical, moi? Tell me I’m not right.
In the last few days, I have enjoyed an amusing and diverting spot of correspondence with an initially disgruntled subscriber to our email list. Now an ex-subscriber, but not an unhappy one. Several interesting issues arose.
Firstly, we don’t always remember what we’ve signed up for. My pen-pal took an exception to a new initiative of mine, which is using our extensive double opt-in email list to verify the data on our directory.
We had the right to mail on two fronts, because we have gone through a robust double opt-in, the initial part of which is someone registering to appear on our directory. So, my pal was double opted-in, and he had originally wanted to appear on the directory…therefore asking him to confirm his details were still accurate was perfectly reasonable.
My first issue, then, is that people sometimes forget what they have agreed to accept. Therefore, some spam is not spam at all. More corned beef with a bit of bitter pickle on the side.
He took exception to this unsolicited intrusion on his busy day and fired off a letter threatening us with everything from the full weight of the law to being flogged…or was that something to do with a Teddy bear?
I replied in similar vein, hopefully with a twist of humour, and we ended up talking on the telephone as well. We were pronounced innocent, and he told me that the reason he chose to chop people off at the kneecaps at the first sign of spam was that hitting unsubscribe did not seem to work.
He told me of several disputes, with big brands, where he did not seem to be able to stop emails appearing in his in-box.
Here is my second issue. Some suppliers out there ignore people who complain. Some suppliers out there ignore people who unsubscribe. So the next time you are offered email addresses for less than £100, ask yourself a few questions.
Because your brand is taking the hit.
My new friend mentioned several mega brands. Either something is going wrong with their process, or they are deliberately ignoring unsubscribes – either way it is doing them real harm.
But more importantly, it is doing the email channel harm. As I have said before in these pages, we need people to trust email. It is the future. It is also the present. It is yet another case of buyer beware, not only in terms of data quality and ROI, but in terms of brand damage.
Much gnashing of teeth in blacktop land this week, when we learned that Paul Grey, having resigned from HMRC, was doing a project for the cabinet office until he finally leaves in the New Year. Disgusting waste of tax payers money, shouldn’t be allowed blah, blah, blah…
Hopefully, like me, you read the entire article
Mr Grey is working his notice period, for goodness sake. He resigned, and like anyone else, he has a notice period specified in his contract.
Having taken responsibility for Datagate, he could not work his notice period there, and the Cabinet Secretary gave him a training project rather than just let him sit at home twiddling his thumbs.
That is not a waste of public money. That is commonsense. It is impossible to find out if this project is worthwhile or not, but the point is he was getting paid anyway, so he might as well do something.
Having taken several pops at HMRC and, indirectly, Mr Grey, I thought it only fair to defend him in this particular instance. Some of our national journalistic friends do tend to get a bit carried away with their professional outrage.
But take away one of their employment rights, and the NUJ are standing around the brazier calling each other comrade.
Joined up thinking does not seem to apply to HM Government, does it? The post datagate apologies went out to a number of people who had moved house, therefore repeating the error of losing their details all over again. The cries of ‘they never told us’ emanating from the corridors of power seem a little feeble…
Ok, I haven’t moved for almost eight years, but I still dimly remember the chore of writing to everyone to tell them we were moving house. Did I tell the child allowance people? To be honest, not sure. No card, no present, but the money still hits the old bank account and keeps James in match attack cards to this very day.
However, I can be reasonably sure I told someone in a government department somewhere. When you add together all the things we have to register for, from council tax, driving licenses and income tax, through child allowance, child tax credits and goodness knows what else, you think they would be able to work it out somehow.
Now before the headline writers on the blacktops start talking about the dangers of big brother, this is insane. Surely an internal change of address file should exist, even if HMG do not want to use the commercial version?
Otherwise, they are making the same mistakes time after time, wasting our hard earned taxes, aren’t they? This is the largest user of data in the country. It should be state of the art, and whilst I accept the idea that one mega-database would be a bad idea for personal freedom, potentially, the data strategy should, at least, be joined together.
They have an electoral roll that was so out of date a million voters would not have got a voting card if Golden Brown had kept his nerve earlier this year. They have no apparent controls on downloading and sharing sensitive information between databases or departments. They do not check they have the right address before apologising for their mistakes, and then include sensitive information in the apology, to compound their error.
This is not Yes Minister or The House of Cards, this is Laurel and Hardy.
On Friday, working from home, Reigate was plunged into darkness by a power cut. By the time the battery in my laptop finally gave up the ghost, I was left twiddling my thumbs, and doing a few chores by candlelight. So I decided to put the paper and tin in the recycling box…
One local free newspaper, with 10 inserts. One charity bag wrapped in plastic. Three credit card offers.
I became slowly obsessed
Three non-me specific missives from my bank. A bundle of door drops delivered by the postman. One of those free local magazines that no one ever reads, except in the dentist’s waiting room.
Then I thought about it a bit more.
There were only five pieces of genuine direct mail in the box. The rest were inserts and door drops, or marketing communications from organisations with which we already have a relationship.
Junk mail is an undefined term. I always thought of it in terms of badly targeted campaigns annoying the hell out of the recipient, but maybe it is time to think a bit more about the definition.
Door drops and inserts are the epitome of the confetti approach and there is too much of it. The amount of targeted DM hitting my letterbox last week did not seem to be over the top, but the amount of DD and inserts did. Not necessarily a representative sample, but food for thought.
Talking of which, where was that pizza voucher, again…
New business development is hard, we all know that. The cost and effort required to find and secure new customers is large, and small businesses often struggle to maintain any consistency in their approach. Direct marketing is often picked up and put down again, depending on budgets, revenue streams and time.
Most businesses in this country are deemed to be small. What that means in practise is no layers of management resource, little time to spare, and less defined roles. In that sort of environment, the marketing department does not exist. Someone may take responsibility for marketing but the function merges with sales, and somehow, some when, what needs to be done gets done.
This engenders its own problems. Marketing is often seen as a cost, not an investment. It is also a hassle, and with no methodological track record to measure success or failure against, the results often under whelm.
Outside help and advice at this level is often subjective and expensive. Not practical, clear, objective and cost effective. This is the sort of client who buys data on minimum order rates. The campaign is less planned than put together, need driven but not exactly part of any grand strategic plot. I speak to a lot of them, usually because they are haggling over price.
And that is a big mistake. It is not the cost of the data that should worry them; it is whether that data is right for what they are trying to do.
One thing is certain; the stamp will probably cost them more. Direct marketing should be about the big picture. It is first contact stuff, the start of a process that culminates in a sale. In different businesses that process will be different, longer or shorter, but the principal is still the same.
Big businesses and their bigger campaigns work in a different way. The data is a small part of the process, and often gets forgotten whilst the creative gets sorted. A deal still needs to be done, and the data still needs to be right, but it is a different focus. Small businesses need to learn from that, and plan accordingly.
Hugh Bessant
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