Print green with a clean database!
Tuesday, 12 June 2012 06:28
Print green with a clean database!
Everyone these days is increase the environmental friendliness of their marketing, and when it comes to print, we often think about accomplishing that by specing recycled paper, working with printers with environmental certifications, and “right sizing” print volumes. But what about cleaning your database?
If you haven’t put “clean data” into your mental bucket for green marketing, maybe it’s time you did.
One of the biggest impacts of print on the environment is pure volume. Although we recycle much of our paper waste in the United States, we don’t recycle it all, especially when it comes to post-consumer waste. Massive — incomprehensibly massive volumes — end up in the landfill.
That’s why one of the ways you can make an immediate impact on your environmental footprint is simply to clean up your database. Update or remove all of those addresses with incorrect or missing information. Otherwise, your documents can end up being sent to the wrong person, the wrong address, or undelivered altogether.
From a marketing perspective, a mailing list with a high percentage of undeliverable addresses is a bad thing. But it’s bad from an environmental perspective, too. All that ink, paper, power, fuel is used to create and distribute a product right to the trash can.
In a Webinar conducted by Direct magazine, for example, Baseline Consulting gave the example of a manufacturer that was shipping 3 million catalogs quarterly. Each catalog cost $2, including postage. Once the company decided to clean up its database, it found that 50% of its catalog mailings were either duplicate, sent to the wrong addresses, undelivered, or sent to the wrong prospects. The results? It cut out the duplicate and bad addresses, reduced its catalog marketing expenses by 50%, and saved $12 million annually. Not only was this step good for the bottom line, it was good for the environment, too!
So next time you think “green printing,” think “clean database.” Eliminate redundant records, kill those bad addresses, and mail only to real, live people. Imagine the green implications!
Everyone these days is increase the environmental friendliness of their marketing, and when it comes to print, we often think about accomplishing that by specing recycled paper, working with printers with environmental certifications, and “right sizing” print volumes. But what about cleaning your database?
If you haven’t put “clean data” into your mental bucket for green marketing, maybe it’s time you did.
One of the biggest impacts of print on the environment is pure volume. Although we recycle much of our paper waste in the United States, we don’t recycle it all, especially when it comes to post-consumer waste. Massive — incomprehensibly massive volumes — end up in the landfill.
That’s why one of the ways you can make an immediate impact on your environmental footprint is simply to clean up your database. Update or remove all of those addresses with incorrect or missing information. Otherwise, your documents can end up being sent to the wrong person, the wrong address, or undelivered altogether.
From a marketing perspective, a mailing list with a high percentage of undeliverable addresses is a bad thing. But it’s bad from an environmental perspective, too. All that ink, paper, power, fuel is used to create and distribute a product right to the trash can.
In a Webinar conducted by Direct magazine, for example, Baseline Consulting gave the example of a manufacturer that was shipping 3 million catalogs quarterly. Each catalog cost $2, including postage. Once the company decided to clean up its database, it found that 50% of its catalog mailings were either duplicate, sent to the wrong addresses, undelivered, or sent to the wrong prospects. The results? It cut out the duplicate and bad addresses, reduced its catalog marketing expenses by 50%, and saved $12 million annually. Not only was this step good for the bottom line, it was good for the environment, too!
So next time you think “green printing,” think “clean database.” Eliminate redundant records, kill those bad addresses, and mail only to real, live people. Imagine the green implications!
