Right first time
When eCards wanted to make sure their web customers’ addresses were correct, they
turned to Satori Software for help.
If your business is built on gathering, exploiting and reselling customer data,
then collecting accurate customer details at the outset isn’t an option — it’s a
necessity.
This is the position eCards, a UK pureplay online company, was in back in 2005.
The business offers a simple yet innovative service, offering consumers the chance
to send their friends and relatives a free digital “e-postcard.” This might be to
celebrate a birthday or wedding anniversary, to congratulate them on passing an
exam or a driving test, or simply to say, “I love you”. Customers can choose from
a broad range of card options on the site, ranging from gentle and sweet greetings
to cheeky messages.
“We offer users a free e-card platform,” says Sam Heaton, managing director of eCards
Media. “We gather customers via Google and word of mouth: 30 per cent of recipients
will go on and send their own cards. Customers are asked to opt in to receive promotional
campaigns when they register.”
By asking customers to provide their details and opt in to third-party contact before
sending their card, eCards has built a database of hundreds of thousands of consumer
records. The company serves banner ads for blue-chip clients like Sky, T-Mobile
and MBNA, and this detailed profile information on first-time and returning customers
is essential in targeting the right ad to each card sender.
However, web users are notorious for entering registration data that is chock-full
of errors, whether deliberately or accidentally. When it started out, the company
would pipe the data from its web form to a back-end database, then periodically
gather up all the valuable registrations and send them off to be cleansed and formatted
correctly by a marketing bureau. According to Heaton, this was a long-winded and
error-prone process. “It was certainly a pain to have to do that legwork,” he says.
In April 2005, eCards decided instead to employ Satori Software’s Mailroom Toolkit
Architect hosted addressing software to make sure that addresses were postally correct
from the minute customers entered their details. Site visitors can now simply enter
their postcode, choose their street number and check the address returned by the
software to make sure they are happy with it, thus reducing the chance of typing
or other errors in data entry to virtually zero.
eCards has a license to look-up and validate both UK and US addresses via the PAF
and USPS reference datasets. As all the software and reference data sets are hosted
remotely by Satori, getting the addressing service up and running was simplicity
itself, involving plugging in a small piece of software to the web server. And because
the main addressing application isn’t held in-house by eCards, the company can leave
software and reference data updates to its supplier.
“The software makes it easier for users to find and enter their address, it’s much
quicker and far less laborious,” says Heaton. “MailRoom ToolKit is a first-rate
system; we’re very happy with it.”
eCards also uses its customer database to drive email campaigns for its clients.
Because accurate postal addresses sit alongside emails within the list, it’s possible
to take advantage of email’s low cost, high speed and potential for interactivity,
while using the postcode to make sure that the right customers get the right offer.
“We can select geographically and demographically for clients based on the postcode,”
says Heaton. “If someone like DFS opens a new store in Bristol, we can target the
catchment area. The tighter we target, the more we can charge for the data, and
that’s one of the reasons that the MailRoom ToolKit software is so valuable to us.”
Opted-in data is also sold on to third parties as bulk lists for direct marketing,
providing a valuable source of extra revenue. Containing a host of indicators like
broadband supplier and age, the eCard data is extremely valuable to b2c consumer
marketers.
“When we sell to third-party suppliers, it also helps to have PAF-validated addresses,”
explains Heaton. “It makes the matching process easier and more accurate.”
eCards is currently trialling a modified data collection model in which it asks
new users only for their email addresses. Once they return to the site to send a
second card, they are offered the chance to join a loyalty scheme. If they sign
up, they can access a portal with premium services like a personal address book
and special offers from affiliate partners in return for providing a greater level
of detail about themselves, including their name and address as verified by Satori.
“This has been working well so far,” says Heaton. “Many users weren’t so happy with
having to enter a lot of details to send a single e-card. We’ve been getting over
30,000 new users a month against 10,000 a month when we were asking for more details.
The Satori system continues to play a key role in verifying the details of our customers.”