Keep It Clean

Not just mail
The value of these address-standardization and -updating offerings also can help an organization running a telemarketing campaign. As a vendor of both postal processing and phone appending, we’ve seen examples of considerable increases in matching phone numbers to records that have gone through postal processing prior to the appending or verification process. In many cases this increase in matched phones can be in double-digit percentages. Considering the cost per thousand involved with the rental of a prospect file and potential waste in paying for those unmatched records, the fractional costs of additional postal processing more than pays for itself.

Giving some more consideration to the quality of your data, be it a housefile or rented prospect list, generally involves making a small investment as a percentage of your total program and can both increase the number of your targeted donors and reduce the costs tied to the waste you may have experienced with prior campaigns.

Brian Whitelock is the vice president of Reston, Va.-based Precision Data Management.