Email, Twitter or … Snail Mail?

Is mail still relevant to you? Photo by smilya7679

The Postman Never Rings Twice

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook and Twitter are replacing email as the “king of communication”.  The US Postal Service is projecting that volume of First Class Mail will decline 37% in 2010 and things are so dire at the UK’s Royal Mail that the British government is looking to sell off the institution that traces its roots to 1516.

So does this means that we should just eliminate the address fields of our CRM systems?  Actually, it doesn’t.  Even with the rise of social media, direct marketing spending will increased by over $1B in 2010, to over $45B.

Since describing our vision for how organizations can achieve marketing success in 2010, this blog has touched on many topics like customer segmentation and campaign execution but without having the correct addresses in your CRM system, the best plans will not work.

Enter Experian QAS

To gain more insight on this issue, I spoke with Innoveer Principal Consultant Luke Emberton.  Luke has been working with our customer Experian QAS over the past year, helping them provide a version of their award winning address verification product to users of Oracle’s CRM On Demand and Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2.

According to Luke and our friends at Experian QAS the best practice for ensuring that a contact or account has a correct address is to ensure that it is entered correctly in the first time.  ”How often do sales people go back and fix the address for their accounts?” Luke asked me hypothetically.

When using QAS for CRM On Demand or QAS for Salesforce.com, finding the correct address is interactive.  As a sales person is entering the address, QAS can make suggestions and even fill in the remaining fields to speed up the data entry.  Luke reports that QAS validates addresses for the US, UK and 26 other countries.

The benefits of such an approach should be as obvious as Priority Mail:

• More accurate address data decreases marketing costs by having fewer returned mail pieces,
• Customer segmentation should improve in certain circumstances because some offerings need to be targeted at certain geographies,
• Customer experience will be improved because product shipments will be sent to the proper addresses,
• Sales reps and others who need to enter address data into their CRM system will be pleased that the system will speed up this process.

Experian QAS will be at Oracle Open World this year and they will be showcasing QAS for CRM On Demand.

Learn More

Heading to Oracle Open World 2010 and want to know which cocktails are most likely to increase CRM success?

Learn the five requirements for creating more effective marketing programs: marketing strategy, lead management,campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.  Beyond mastering marketing and sales, organizations like Sam’s Club also succeed or fail based on the quality of their membership experience. For more on member-centric best practices, read Innoveer’s Q&A with The Lawn Tennis Association.