News & Events

May 6, 2008

Database Release May 2008

This monthly database update covers 54 countries and territories served by 28 databases. Among others, addresses for Montenegro, Serbia, Thailand and Western Sahara have been updated.

Montenegro declared its independency from Serbia in 2006. Due to a technical requirement, the postal data for Montenegro are still covered by the Serbian database. The Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are used in both countries. Customers, who want to validate their addresses in both alphabets, can work with AddressDoctor. AddressDoctor can process addresses in 40 different character sets with the help of its automatic transliteration.

Western Sahara is a territory at the Atlantic coast of North West Africa. It is served partially by the Moroccan Post. The database was expanded by some localities. Also, provinces have been added. Western Sahara has no postal code system.

Thailand was updated with the newest data. The database was expanded by post box postal codes. Furthermore, exonyms for Bangkok have also been included.

April 30, 2008

Postal News – Database quality is key

The typical response rate of Direct Mail is 1-5%. As such, there are huge differences in the success of each campaign. Royal Mail has contracted Quadrangle recently to identify common characteristics of successful campaigns.

By analyzing more than 600 campaigns, 5 main influential factors were found. Along with creativity of the mailing, data quality was seen as the key to success. This statement applies to mailings to customers as well businesses. Successful B2C mailings are often based on customer databases. Purchased address lists seem to be more effective in the B2B sector.

The amount spent on the mailing was shown to be less important than creativity. Nonetheless, low-budget mailings did perform poorly. Most successful consumer campaigns included additional marketing activities, such as a follow-up call. Lastly, the logistics were shown to influence the success of a campaign that can deliver a 70% increase in response rate for consumer campaigns and 36% for B2B campaigns. But one of the main critical success factors is high-quality data that can increase average levels of response by 50%.

The complete research is available at www.royalmail.com/campaigneffectiveness.