Have you ever received a direct mail from a company? Most people have and I assume you have to. I am sure just as many have received multiple mailings from the same company of the same advertisement or notice. Obviously this cost them even more for their mailing. Not to mention the waste of resources involved. Why do they do this? Well one possible reason is they (the company) have collected your information multiple times or they hold separate records of people at your address. They have this data and use it to perform their mailing campaigns. What they have not done either because they are unaware of it or because they erroneously think they will lose data, is dedup it. E.G. remove the duplicate records.

Given that many companies send out direct mail to advertise their service or product they spend hundreds to thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars to do this. The lists they use are purchased or collected and maintained via their business. The former sometimes comes from vendors that neglect the quality of data they ship out and the later is often neglected by ignorance of deduping E.G. they do not know how or that it is even needed. Their in house consumer list should be duplicated to a new list the mailing list and deduped prior to mailing. Given the recent down turn in the economy and everyone’s tighter budgets it simply makes sense and is important to spend a little to save a lot on deduping mailing lists.

 

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