| Data Dos and Dont's |  |
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How can you make the best start of your DM campaign? This guide to making your data work for you should help, but don’t hesitate to ask us for more assistance - we can help maximise the effectiveness of your campaign by making your data working harder for you.
Do! Check, check and check again...The most off-putting thing about DM from a customer’s perspective is getting their name wrong. Plus of course, if the error is significant, your mailing may never reach its addressee, which is not a good use of your budget. Speak to the experts early on The sooner we’re involved, the sooner we can save money - you might have printed your DM and even put stamps on everything but by then it’s too late to save! Feel free to use any one of the following formats for your data Fox pro, Visual Fox pro, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, ASCII, delimited text file (using tabs, commas or quotation marks) - we can work with them all. If none of your favourites is on the list above, please speak to us, we are past masters at converting data from all sorts of environments to run in our system. Use separate fields to store titles, names, surnames If you do, you have more flexibility about addressing your recipients by their first names for a personal touch, or more formally with a title and surname. You can even include a field in your database for honorifics, so your addressees can include formal titles. Keep it consistent Use fields consistently - always put the postcode in the postcode field, for instance. Don’t mix and match - you’ll end up with data that needs some serious cleansing before you start a mailing. If your database is already in a bit of a muddle, we can fix it with a good old cleanse and de-dupe. Don’t! Be inconsistentConsistency is key when it comes to avoiding duplication - a computer will recognise ‘Yorks’ and ‘Yorkshire’ as difference places, not duplicates, even if they refer to the same recipient. We can minimise duplication by checking a number of elements of the address, but consistency as a rule is one that will save time and money! Use punctuation where it’s not needed Don’t use punctuation within address lines unless unavoidable, as sometimes punctuation, such as quotation marks around house names, can cause problems with data conversion. Let us know if you think this may occur in your data and we can double check. |
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