Address management software

According to recent research from Royal Mail, 51 per cent of companies have terminated a contract or a business relationship because they have received wrongly addressed mail. Most people have had mail that contains spelling or factual errors in the address, and while we may not always go so far as to terminate the contract, we have all thought that little bit less of the sender. This is mail that is only slightly wrong. It’s impossible to tell how much sent mail is so poorly addressed that it never reaches the recipient.

A business buyer might forgive his domestic energy supplier for misspelling his name, or might still look at a mailshot from a charity that got his gender wrong, but he will not be so lenient when he gets to the office and finds that his supplier of £3 million worth of laptops cannot spell his name, or his accountant who he met two days ago thinks he is a woman. In B2B marketing, address management is absolutely essential. Fortunately, there is a growing range of software available to help with the task.

What does address management software do?

Broadly speaking, address management software has two functions. It collects accurate data and keeps it accurate. Terry Hiles, MD of address management software provider Capscan, elaborates, “Once a company has captured a customer’s data, the software immediately checks it against the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) that contains 27 million addresses. The user only needs to enter a postcode and street number or name, or even just a partial address, and the software will return the full, valid address for input into the database. Some packages can even do this internationally for anything up to 240 countries.”

He continues, “In order to maintain an address database, the software will check through the contacts/records, using powerful and sophisticated searching tools, adding postcodes and inserting missing address elements. It also checks the data against suppression files for the deceased, those who have relocated and those who have registered with a preference service.”

David Cruickshank, MD of Business IT Online – specialist supplier of IT to small businesses – points out that as email marketing becomes ever more important, so B2B marketers have become increasingly interested in address management software for email addresses. This operates in the same way as traditional address management software, with the emphasis on accuracy and relevance.

Why do B2B marketers use it?

We have already seen that failing to get addresses right can damage customer relationships and result in goods or important documents not arriving. Rebecca Clayton, director of marketing at address management software provider QAS, outlines some of the benefits of this technology, “It helps you capture data quickly and accurately. It gives you access to 2.79 million business name and address details, and minimises the number of keystrokes required to record an address, making your data capture agents more efficient. It also enables you to profile your database for future marketing activity and analysis. Database analysis is always easier and more reliable with accurate and consistent address records.”

This software can also reduce errors made by call-centre agents mishearing or misspelling address data. Harris Interactive research last year found that information workers in the EU spend eight hours a week verifying data. Address management software can cut this significantly. Furthermore, it enables companies to remain on top of changes to your address data. Your customers and prospects change address, but Royal Mail itself also changes up to 11 per cent of postcodes every year, meaning that even if a customer has stayed at the same address, you could still be sending mail to the wrong address unless you keep your records up to date with this sort of software.

Clayton concludes, “Your company’s image will be protected and you won’t be wasting money on mail that never gets delivered. Due to the fact that the software runs monthly updates – using the 1.2 million changes that are made to PAF every year – you can also remain confident of the quality of your address data.”

What to consider when buying

As with all software, there is much to consider when choosing address management software. You need to consider how easy it will be to use. This software is there to increase efficiencies, not take up resources, therefore, consider how well it will integrate with other applications to form part of a broader data management system. You need to consider how much ongoing support you will need and how much this will cost.

However, the biggest issue to address is whether to buy an inhouse license or to subscribe to an externally-hosted address management service on a per-click or set fee basis. These online and on-demand services are becoming more and more popular amongst SMEs, who appreciate the ease of use, the flexibility and the scalability. At lower volumes, they tend to be less expensive, and they obviate the need for inhouse expertise and resources. However, if you already have these skills and resources, and have a large amount of data to manage, then buying a license will probably make more sense.

Chris Cuffe, MD at address management software provider HelpIT, points out that, while important, address management is just one element in the larger process of acquiring and maintaining clean and accurate data. He says, “An all-in-one data-cleansing solution encompasses de-duplication, address correction, suppression, mail-sort and so on. It can often be better to buy an all-in-one solution, rather than implement each aspect separately. In particular, the smarter marketer will seek address management that delivers more than just postcoding.”

He continues, “The humble UK postcode is a blessing for marketers as it can be used in so many ways to unravel the mystery of data. It is now becoming possible to add a huge range of variables to data, simply from the postcode. For business data there is telephone and fax numbers, SIC codes, company registration numbers and employee site counts, to name but a few. The market will continue to expand in this way, with address data increasingly allowing marketers to segment their data and so discover new opportunities.”

Future growth

It is generally accepted that over the next few years companies can expect to see growth in requirements for hosted, pay-on-demand address management services. We have already seen this trend in the broader CRM software market, with larger players such as Salesforce and RightNow taking this route, and we can expect to see further launches of address management products, such as Capscan OnDemand.

Colin Rickard, EMEA MD at address management software company DataFlux, believes that it will become increasingly difficult for firms to focus exclusively on this aspect of data management. He says, “We will see consolidation in this market. Larger data management houses will acquire specialist address management companies and integrate this offering. The need for a holistic customer data solution is driving this trend.”

Finally, the technology will continue to evolve. As it becomes ever more sophisticated, B2B marketers must remember the essentials of address management. They will need to remember that a data strategy must be driven from the top of an organisation, analysis of accurate data is the foundation of every successful marketing campaign and that careless use of inaccurate data is one of the fastest ways to lose a customer.

Supplemental: Case study – Energy Information Centre

The Energy Information Centre (EIC) is an energy consultancy that provides wholesale and retail market intelligence, outsourced procurement, data management services, carbon management and a strategic consultancy service to industrial, commercial and public sector energy users. It has over 600 customers, including 40 per cent of the FTSE 100. Its CRM databases contain around 20,000 records, and ensuring they remain accurate and free from duplicates is a constant challenge. Marketing executive, James Kelly, says,” We had always outsourced data-cleansing to third-party providers. However, results were variable so we couldn’t be sure if they were identifying all potentially duplicated records.” In addition, EIC often faced difficulties when integrating data from third parties into its databases due to format inconsistencies such as varying address fields. It was keen to find an inhouse address management solution that would stop it sending duplicate mailings to the same contacts. “It looks highly unprofessional to send several copies of the same material to the same person, particularly if there are mistakes in the name or address,” says Kelly. “It also wastes valuable resources including time, stationery and postage. And, of course, manual checking would be completely impractical.” EIC now uses the MatchIT data-cleansing suite from helpIT systems. The software uses a phonetics-based, ‘fuzzy-matching’ engine, which compares records in terms of how words sound in addition to spellings and fields of data entry. It also recognises common name variations such as ‘Bill’ for ‘William’ and ‘Beth’ or ‘Liz’ for ‘Elizabeth’. Kelly reports that using MatchIT, EIC identifies more duplicated records than ever before. He says, “When we want to append new data from third-party data lists, we can link new contacts or new addresses to companies that are already in our main data set. Bringing in this software was one of the best business decisions we have ever made.”

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