Some marketing professionals are expressing concern about the amount of waste in b-to-b direct marketing, BtoB reports. Data quality issues caused by inadequate attention to list maintenance and data management cause duplicate catalogs being delivered to customers and catalogs returned due to address errors.

Targeting – or the lack thereof – is another issue. Business decision-makers have become accustomed to regularly receiving – and dumping – marketing mail that’s neither relevant nor timely.

“I don’t think companies are giving any thought to the value of customer data integration, predictive modeling and data analytics as a way to reduce their environmental impact,” said Jeff Zabin, director of marketing at Fair Isaac Corp.

One solution is to get smarter about mail streams. “We have developed a variety of mail streams in order to optimize the number of catalogs that customers receive, so that customers who require less direct mail do not receive books that would end up as waste,” said Kristin Micalizio, VP-direct sales at Office Depot.