Candis - Newhall Publications

Background

Newhall Publications is the home of Candis magazine. Candis is a best-selling, subscription-only women's magazine.

The business need

The deployment of Postcode Anywhere’s address validation enabled our 100 direct sales agents to key in address details on a door-to-door basis directly into their handheld mobile devices. Previously, subscriber details were being written down by hand and rekeyed into the company database on a weekly basis. This resulted in data becoming lost and corrupted and a significant delay between the receipt of subscription details and the setting-up of a new customer record.

Why Postcode Anywhere?

We have been using Postcode Anywhere’s UK addressing solution deployed in hand-held PDAs successfully since 2004. Newhall Publications were early adopters of the PDA as a means of collecting subscriber information.

A Royal Mail database audit revealed a staggering 99.8% accuracy from over 300,000 records. We were told that it was one of the cleanest databases they had ever come across.

More recently Newhall Publications chose Postcode Anywhere’s BACS solution to integrate with our Myriad CRM which provides the data to service two separate call centres and automatically verifies the account, debit and credit card details for corporate and consumer customers. Prior to using Postcode Anywhere’s BACS solution, call centre operatives had to telephone each customer whose bank details were rejected.

Benefits

Before using postcode validation a member of the admin team would spend a minimum of ten hours per week correcting data manually. If you equate this to paying someone £7.50 per hour at ten hours, after 52 weeks of the year it amounts to an annual saving of £3,900.

Before using Bank Validation from Postcode Anywhere, we estimate that out of the total 60,000 subscription direct debits processed, one in 50 would be rejected. Call centre operator time would also be incurred telephoning the subscribers of the rejected bank details - and more often than not the calls were abortive, basically resulting in a lost sale.

The admin time spent was significant as well as the cost of lost revenue calculated at two percent of 60,000 subscriptions x £35 which equals an annual saving of £4,200. The consolidation of the two services has also saved us £1,500 in licence fees, making an overall yearly saving of £9,600.

The bottom line

Postcode Anywhere’s address validation and BACS verification is not used in a proactive marketing application, but it does help the process of converting leads to sales. In that respect it is an invaluable point-of-sale (POS) marketing tool.

IT Director Chris Harman says: “We found Postcode Anywhere’s web service easy to integrate into third party software products and their technical support team really helpful. As a testimonial to their service we recently had a Royal Mail database audit, the findings of which revealed a staggering 99.8% accuracy from over 300,000 records. We were told that it was one of the cleanest databases they had ever come across.”