Apres vacation, le deluge?
We just went on a very nice family vacation to Greece for three weeks, and the wife put the mail on hold while we were gone. While I successfully avoided thinking about customer data integration for most of that time, the minute I got back I was struck by the fact that the people that are marketing to me by the US Mail don't know me at all.
Holding your mail is a very nice and convenient service offered by the USPS, and one which you can take care of online. Normally, since we live in an upscale, affluent neighborhood, we get about 3 inches of mail per day. Yes, we measure our mail in inches. This avalanche of mail is 95% advertising - credit card offers with tens of thousands of frequent flyer miles, free vacations for sitting through timeshare presentations, coupons and flyers and sales, sales, sales.
A funny thing happened when we got back, though. You might think that having been gone for 18 postal delivery days we would have 18x3 = 54 inches of mail, or about 4 1/2 feet of it. Instead, we had less than 12 inches.
Now I've been down at the mailbox on Saturday when our mailman - or in our case a "mailperson" (since "mailwoman" is too oxymoronic for me) - has delivered the mail, and you'll see them pull out a bunch of letters that are addressed, and then start adding in unaddressed flyers and cards and envelopes. Presumably, companies pay for this local delivery. We got NONE of those while our mail was being held. This was a benefit we did not foresee.
Obviously this is CDI related, or I wouldn't mention it here. One of the primary benefits of having a consolidated, up-to-date, comprehensive record of your customers is the cross-departmental activity tracking that becomes available. For marketing, this means more effective targeting in mail campaigns, and less duplication and wasted postage.
My wife had a small business two years ago, and American Express keeps hounding her to open up a Platinum Business Account. (You're pre-approved up to $5,000!) MBNA wants me to transfer my VISA balance so badly that they've not only forgotten that I'm an MBNA Mastercard holder, but they've solicited me at least 20 times this year alone. Washington Mutual thinks I should refinance my mortgage again. Since WaMu already has my home loan, I find this curious. Particularly since they are so diligent about it. If I had refinanced every time I got a flyer from them, I'd probably have racked up a million dollars in points and fees by now.
Now I know this is hardly unique, but the point is that the cumulative waste of all this marketing and the associated cost is staggering. Figure a credit card company doing a national mailing incurs $0.35 postage with the pre-sort discounts, and the letters and envelopes cost $0.03 each. That's $0.38 per mailing. If I have received 20 so far this year, I'm on track to get 30+ by year end. That's $11.40 wasted on me, every year. Multiply that by a mailing to 2 million homes, and you're throwing away a lot of hard-earned cash at $22 million per marketing campaign. Every year.
When the profligation of junk mail has reached the proportion that putting a hold on your mail seems like a valuable service - not so much for not delivering the mail while you're away, but because it cuts down on the volume of junk! - something needs to be done. Companies are burning up goodwill, damaging their images and reputations with - potentially - their best customers, and wasting money at a prodigious rate.
Perhaps this is based on a theory that opportunities are time-limited, and if your offer isn't in the hands of the customer when the opportunity arises you miss it. That might not be correct - or more specifically it might be considerably more complicated than that - but at least it's rational, and an "overhead" of wasted mail expense is a built in factor. But - and this is the important part - each piece of junk mail that comes in ratchets up my negative feelings about that company another degree, and eventually it gets to the point where I won't do business with them. Companies need to consolidate their customer bases and their prospect lists, and manage the contact paradigm to keep at least some minimum threshold of goodwill.
Meanwhile, I see a few options. Perhaps opening a post office box avoids the handout mailers - doubtful, but worth looking into. Perhaps I can implement my own paradigm where I put the mail on hold every Monday and take it off every Friday. So I get my mail once a week, on Saturday, when I have time to go through it. And without all the junk advertisements. But if the USPS is really on the ball, they should look into implementing a fee-based opt-out service. I'd gladly pay $5 per month to cut my mail by 70% or more and get rid of much of the trash advertising. Sure, companies pay them to deliver these advertisements, but what if I pay them more to *not* deliver it to me?
Holding your mail is a very nice and convenient service offered by the USPS, and one which you can take care of online. Normally, since we live in an upscale, affluent neighborhood, we get about 3 inches of mail per day. Yes, we measure our mail in inches. This avalanche of mail is 95% advertising - credit card offers with tens of thousands of frequent flyer miles, free vacations for sitting through timeshare presentations, coupons and flyers and sales, sales, sales.
A funny thing happened when we got back, though. You might think that having been gone for 18 postal delivery days we would have 18x3 = 54 inches of mail, or about 4 1/2 feet of it. Instead, we had less than 12 inches.
Now I've been down at the mailbox on Saturday when our mailman - or in our case a "mailperson" (since "mailwoman" is too oxymoronic for me) - has delivered the mail, and you'll see them pull out a bunch of letters that are addressed, and then start adding in unaddressed flyers and cards and envelopes. Presumably, companies pay for this local delivery. We got NONE of those while our mail was being held. This was a benefit we did not foresee.
Obviously this is CDI related, or I wouldn't mention it here. One of the primary benefits of having a consolidated, up-to-date, comprehensive record of your customers is the cross-departmental activity tracking that becomes available. For marketing, this means more effective targeting in mail campaigns, and less duplication and wasted postage.
My wife had a small business two years ago, and American Express keeps hounding her to open up a Platinum Business Account. (You're pre-approved up to $5,000!) MBNA wants me to transfer my VISA balance so badly that they've not only forgotten that I'm an MBNA Mastercard holder, but they've solicited me at least 20 times this year alone. Washington Mutual thinks I should refinance my mortgage again. Since WaMu already has my home loan, I find this curious. Particularly since they are so diligent about it. If I had refinanced every time I got a flyer from them, I'd probably have racked up a million dollars in points and fees by now.
Now I know this is hardly unique, but the point is that the cumulative waste of all this marketing and the associated cost is staggering. Figure a credit card company doing a national mailing incurs $0.35 postage with the pre-sort discounts, and the letters and envelopes cost $0.03 each. That's $0.38 per mailing. If I have received 20 so far this year, I'm on track to get 30+ by year end. That's $11.40 wasted on me, every year. Multiply that by a mailing to 2 million homes, and you're throwing away a lot of hard-earned cash at $22 million per marketing campaign. Every year.
When the profligation of junk mail has reached the proportion that putting a hold on your mail seems like a valuable service - not so much for not delivering the mail while you're away, but because it cuts down on the volume of junk! - something needs to be done. Companies are burning up goodwill, damaging their images and reputations with - potentially - their best customers, and wasting money at a prodigious rate.
Perhaps this is based on a theory that opportunities are time-limited, and if your offer isn't in the hands of the customer when the opportunity arises you miss it. That might not be correct - or more specifically it might be considerably more complicated than that - but at least it's rational, and an "overhead" of wasted mail expense is a built in factor. But - and this is the important part - each piece of junk mail that comes in ratchets up my negative feelings about that company another degree, and eventually it gets to the point where I won't do business with them. Companies need to consolidate their customer bases and their prospect lists, and manage the contact paradigm to keep at least some minimum threshold of goodwill.
Meanwhile, I see a few options. Perhaps opening a post office box avoids the handout mailers - doubtful, but worth looking into. Perhaps I can implement my own paradigm where I put the mail on hold every Monday and take it off every Friday. So I get my mail once a week, on Saturday, when I have time to go through it. And without all the junk advertisements. But if the USPS is really on the ball, they should look into implementing a fee-based opt-out service. I'd gladly pay $5 per month to cut my mail by 70% or more and get rid of much of the trash advertising. Sure, companies pay them to deliver these advertisements, but what if I pay them more to *not* deliver it to me?
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