Royal Mail has posted an announcement on its website stating that the following products and services, including all bulk products, will become liable to VAT from 2 April 2012:

Advertising Mail (70, 120, 700 and 1400)

Automated Standard Tariff Large Letter

Cleanmail

Cleanmail Advance

Cleanmail Plus

Do not redirect

First and Second Class Standard Tariff Account mail

Mailsort (70, 120, 700 and 1400)

Ministerial Pouch Services

Packetpost

Packetsort

Packetsort Plus

Packetsort Returns

PO Box Services

Presstream

Redirect Diversion

Response Services (inc licence fees)

Sustainable Mail

Walksort

While most businesses can claim back VAT payments, charities and companies working in the financial services, two of the biggest users of advertising mail cannot claim back the VAT. So if you are in either of these sectors, this will have a significant impact on your business. It will be even more essential that customer mailings are accurately targeted and valuable budget and resource is not wasted on out of date data.

Data8 provide a complete online data cleansing service, where files can be uploaded and processed 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Prior to any mail activity duplicates, deceased, mps and goneaway records can all be suppressed to ensure you are not wasting any valuable budget. You also have the ability to load, process and view the results achieved in a data audit without any commitment to buy. If the audit demonstrates the data is accurate you have ensured you are targeting accurate customer information without any upfront investment.

Last minute Christmas Mailings to send out? Once final push to consumers to promote your product and services! Then make it count by ensuring you are targeting the right people.  Don't waste your time, resource and money on out of date customer information.

Cleanse your data through data8online now to obtain a free data quality audit.  Check you have no deceased or goneaway records within your data, and obtain forwarding addresses for valuable customers that have moved and not updated their records with you. If you haven't audited your data in the last 12 months, ask yourself what percentage of your mailing will be unopened and put in the bin due to it being addressed to the wrong proprietor.

Data8online is operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and processes on average 100,000 records per hour so your mailing will not be delayed.  Call our sales team and ensure your Christmas Mailing drops through the letterbox to the right person and the right time.

If I was to ask you how accurate your prospect data is, would the response be "pretty accurate as I have recently purchased the data," then you could have a problem. More and more frequently I am working with organisations who have purchased prospect data from brokers that have provided no validation or cleansing on the data for some time. The "accurate prospect data" customers are purchasing can be significantly out of date.

I have witnessed goneaway rates in excess of 20% on new prospect data.  We work with many brokers who will ensure they are cleansing the data prior to supply so that only accurate prospect data is provided, but does your broker do this?

Process your prospect data with data8 to see exactly how accurate your data is.  Suppress goneaway and deceased records, and take advantage of any change of addresses that can be updated using our mover services. You have taken the time to highlight your target audience, you have spent money on design and print, don't let your valuable marketing budget be wasted on out of date prospect data.  Register now for data8online for free, and receive a free data quality audit on your data to see where improvements can be made.

Royal Mail stipulate for all direct mail sent through services such as Cleanmail, Mailsort, Sustainable Mail, Mail Entry Mail and Advertising Mail that address data needs to be minimum 90% compliant for PAF, and for CBC mailings 90% of Post Codes must have a valid DPS appended.  Many organisations have not met this requirement and continued to mail data with poor address quality data.  From October 31st 2011, if an organisation fails to meet the DPS requirement for CBC mailings, there will be a surcharge of 0.5p per item charged.

So how do you check if you meet Royal Mail requirements.  It's simple, register for our data8online service and process the mailing file you have to understand what percentage of your data is PAF compliant, and how your address data can be improved further.  Our standard PAF service not only cleanses address information to a Royal Mail PAF standard, but as part of our standard service you also have the ability to append both a CBC code and a DPS on output at no extra cost.

Furthermore, we can also ensure your investment is protected by ensuring the individuals you are mailing are not deceased or goneaway and are suppressed from your mailing.  Potentially, we can also provide a forwarding address for around 50% of indentified goneaways.  Registration is free.  To obtain a data quality audit is free.  Ensure you meet Royal Mail Requirements today, use our 24 hour data cleansing service, data8online.

For those of us who work in the data cleansing industry there are so many positive responses that can be given for why is data cleansing so important? For an organisation that has not understood the value of their customer database before, or has not had board level commitment to include this as part of their Sales & Marketing strategy, this is a legitimate question.

There are so many reasons why data cleansing is important to an organisation, but here are some are the main few.

1.    If we don’t know our customers or where they are, it is impossible to maximise their full buying potential resulting in missed sales opportunities.

2.    As an organisation if we mail a customer who has moved and deliver to a new occupier, we build lack of customer confidence on a number of levels:-

Our customers who are not receiving our mail lose sight of who we are and believe we show no commitment to them as a supplier.

The new proprietors who receive mailings for someone who doesn’t live in the property talk about their experiences to family and friends resulting in negative word of mouth and damaged brand image increasing customer churn rates.

3.    Many other services such as customer profiling can only be as accurate as the data you are working with.  If you have out of date customer addresses and you are conducting analysis on buying trends, how can this be accurate if the data you are working with is inaccurate? Yet we can make important marketing decision based on such analysis.

4.    If you hold information on a customer and do not attempt to “know your customer” you are infringing data protection legislation which can results in prosecution and further bad press.

It’s simple. Register with data8online free of charge today and process your customer database to obtain a free comprehensive report on your data.  Don’t miss potential sales and customer opportunities because you haven’t considered data cleansing as important.  Suppress your goneaway and deceased records now, and obtain forwarding address for movers and see greater return on investment on your customer base.