Environmental Leader

Fort percent of companies surveyed for a new Aberdeen Group report ranked direct mail waste reduction as one of the top two areas of focus when it comes to adopting more eco-friendly business practices. The report, Green Marketing: Leveraging Customer Data to Reduce Direct Mail Waste, was funded by QAS, a company that sells address data quality software, and DM Review.

Aberdeen found that 50 percent of best-in-class companies, compared to 40 percent of “laggards,” currently merge/purge customer data “thoroughly.” Nearly twice as many best-in-class companies as laggards plan to start doing so in the future. Of the 54 percent of companies that use segmentation and modeling to “select with care” which customer names to be mailed to, only 47 percent of laggards indicated that they do it “very well,” compared to 83 percent of best-in-class companies.

Eighty-five percent of best-in-class companies experience year-over-year improvement in customer retention levels, compared to five percent of laggards. And best-in-class companies have achieved a 266 percent improvement in customer profitability compared to laggards.

A recent survey from DMNews and Pitney Bowes found that negative perceptions of mail’s environmental impact are based on “widespread public misunderstandings.” The report said that 48 percent of those surveyed believed that mail was half of the content in the nation’s landfills. Mail, according to the report, actually makes up two percent of the nation’s municipal waste.