FEATURE SUPPRESSION
Intelligent approach
Once seen as a luxury, now viewed rightly as a necessity, suppression is standard practice for direct marketers in 2010, but just ticking that box is no longer enough and optimising suppression routines is the new goal for many marketers, finds Antony Begley.
O
nce the preserve of cutting-edge marketers and enterprise-scale organisations with enterprise-scale budgets, routine suppression is now
standard practice for the vast majority of businesses carrying out direct marketing - but one marketer's approach to suppression can be very different to another's.
The subtleties and nuances involved in optimising suppression for the company's needs is more an art than a science with much debate on the best way to make use of suppression files without inadvertently knocking out perfectly legitimate contacts at the same time. And it’s this often overlooked aspect of suppression that we are concerned with in this article. For many, suppression remains a box-ticking exercise, a necessary evil to keep the FD and the DMA happy and satisfy section 4 of the Data Protection Act, but it shouldn’t be that way. UK Changes Director Steve Day explains:
“Suppression is sometimes incorrectly used as a term for data quality and whilst suppressing goneaways, invalid or non-responsive records is
28 April 2010
“The ability to select the correct files and use them at the right time on the right segments of the client database is of critical importance.”
Steve Day, Director, UK Changes
an integral element of a data quality strategy, it is only part of the story of suppression. “The ability to select the correct files and use them at the right time on the right segments of the client database is of critical importance and is becoming a distinguishing factor between suppliers, as some simply rush to apply as many suppressions as possible, where others tread more carefully, opting to use the suppression data with more intelligence.”
And it’s this quandary that lies at the heart of the great suppression debate. Marketing Service
Providers are financially incentivised to come up with as many matches as possible, to maximise their revenues, but that’s not necessarily delivering the best results for the client. So the choice of provider is a very, very important one for the marketer because a little extra time at the front end will invariably pay dividends at the business end.
HABIT FORMING
“Many marketers have fallen into the practice of running suppression out of habit, always doing it the same way, or just blindly taking what the bureau gives them without ever thinking about it,” says REaD Group Product Development Manager Luci Penn.
“But with something as nuanced as
suppression, it always pays to think about what you’re doing as you can invariably get an uplift with a few tweaks in the right place. It’s tempting to just leave the bureau to get on with it and forget about it, but if clients make the effort to work with their bureaux more often than not find out that it was worth their while.”
www.dmarket.co.uk
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