By Melissa Donovan
Part 2 of 2
Direct mail marketing campaigns must utilize the correct data. A wealth of information is available and the correct tools are necessary to ensure it is used correctly. This must be done in conjunction with service level agreements or SLAs and country-wide regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 or HIPAA.
Data Management Solutions
Basics like address verification, national change of address (NCOA), de-duping, suppression, as well as proprietary charge of address tools are helpful to print providers looking for ways to manage their client’s data. Here we share data management solutions with these features and more.
AccuZIP Data Quality Solutions include software, services, and APIs that can be used for coding accuracy support systems (CASS) Certified address validation, updating contact data with new change-of-address information, integrating address validation into your own system for batch validation of entire lists or point of entry address validation, performing address standardization and correction during address entry on your website, and enhancing your existing contact data with deceased suppression, third-party change of address, residential delivery indicator, and apartment append.
Melissa enables users to verify and correct data at point of entry with its Data Quality Suite. It standardizes, verifies, and corrects all your contact data—postal address, email address, phone number, and name for effective communications and efficient business operations. The Data Quality Suite is a toolkit of on-premise APIs or web services. The on-premise, multi-platform APIs work with AIX, HPUX, Oracle, Solaris, HPUX, and Windows and can be used with any programming language. The web services version of the suite supports JSON, REST, and XML.
Quadient BCC Architect is a comprehensive contact data quality solution that integrates into ERP and CRM systems. Functionality can be extended to meet changing business needs. For example, contact details can be appended, like head of household, email, or phone numbers. BCC Architect identifies moves not reported to the United States Postal Service (USPS). The BCC Bulk Mailer platform is an end-to-end workflow. A list is placed into the solution and the user can manipulate it every which way, right down to printing it out, connecting with the USPS mail.dat servers, and tracking the mailing once it is out in the mail stream. CASS and Presort Accuracy, Validation, and Evaluation or PAVE certified, BCC Bulk Mailer features built-in NCOA address correction services, a Duplication Search tool, custom address printer support, and a real-time Move Update service.
Racami, LLC’s Alchem-e system ingests source data from wherever it comes from, normalizes it, and acts as a workflow tool to integrate and automate the processing between systems. It also measures what’s happening in the delivery channels like USPS mail tracking as well as SMS and records the history of communications to individuals, so marketing gets incrementally better to each individual.
SpencerMetrics LNYK automates machine data acquisition, basic analytical visualization, and provides processed information via its API. CONNECT further automates shop floor data acquisition while motivating operators and informing management; its analysis identifies opportunities for workflow improvement resulting in reduced process time and significant cost reduction.
TEC Mailing Solutions, LLC’s robust hosted mailing solutions revolutionize the mailing industry. TEC’s API can integrated in any workflow while one-off processing can be done in MailPreparer while managing full-service intelligent mail barcode uniqueness for full service and seamless mailings across your entire enterprise.
Integrated Workflow
Data management solutions are great on their own, but even better when communicating with a print provider’s greater workflow setup.
“Integration between processing tools is important, especially for workflows that can be automated. The best integrations today are through API, but many of the existing tools have been around for a while and might not have APIs. Good alternatives are command line, scripting, and file exchange,” advises Matt Mahoney, EVP, sales and marketing, Racami.
David R. Spencer, president/CEO, SpencerMetrics, notes that “most operational data can be obtained automatically via software, HoT, etc. and made available to other pieces of workflow via APIs—per Factory 4.0 philosophy.”
Connecting to modern-hosted APIs for postal processing is very common and essential for streamlining operations, according to Scott Eganhouse, VP business development, TEC Mailing. He also sees “extending address hygiene options to the mail owner and single-pass postal optimization strategies that have hard dollar demonstrable savings as a must for high-volume mailers. SaaS integrations reduce the burden on your IT staff and never need updating so the benefits can be felt through your entire organization.”
Piet De Pauw, head of marketing, Enfocus, an Esko company, says there are many ways to integrate with variable data handling solutions and direct mail specific data management. For instance, there is an out-of-the-box integration with AccuZIP that installs with Enfocus’ Switch. The print workflow automation platform makes integration between pretty much any DMS and production workflow possible through Node.js scripting.
Successful Mail
Data management tools are an essential component to a successful direct mail campaign. Without them, the data used is subject to failure. Executing any form of data management is essential when a print provider is handling customer-supplied information that will eventually be used in a direct mail marketing campaign.
Read part one of this article, Achieving Accuracy.
Nov2021, DPS Magazine
