Partially Addressed Mail

Direct Mail

Partially Addressed Mail

The biggest trade-off you'll make with Partially Addressed Mail is with personal data. It is a service that strips away personal data. So, you won't be able to personalise the salutation "Dear Mr Smith" because Mr Smith is personal data.

The upside is you can access postal costs.

This post provides arguments why not having the ability to use personal data is not a barrier when marketing to the affluent.

Yes, personalisation bonds your message to the recipient. This mailing is for me and is important. However, when you’re targeting the affluent there is a compelling case for this new alternative.

Let's get into it!

 

Personalisation often isn’t used

You can check this. Take a look at your own mail. In lots of mail you'll see that personalisation pretty much starts and ends at the name in the address block and the salutation.

You know:

Dear Mr Arrowsmith (insert your surname here). Formal, polite and relevant. The mailer has been sent for my attention. No-one else. And if your name isn't on the letter, you are breaking the law by 'interfering with the King's mail'.  Your letter is not for my neighbour, or my wife, or one of the kids. Just me.

This service trades away the personalisation benefits in favour of getting your message to a particular household.

 

Partially Addressed Mail is GDPR Compliant

With Partially Addressed Mail, you cannot use personally identifiable data such as a name.

This is what makes this new advertising mail alternative GDPR compliant.

Instead, you can set up collective names on your mailing, which claw back some of the advantages of using names.

One the one hand this service is de-personalised, so if you are going to spend money marketing to the affluent, are you running the risk of poorer campaign outcomes?

 

How Do You Make a Partially Addressed Mail 'FEEL' like it is Personalised?

Use a locality.

If you live in a village, town or neighbourhood, use a collective name that applies the locality.

You are recognising and connecting to something tangible about the recipient, like where they live, and potentially invoking curiosity to ensure the mailing is opened.

Let's say you live in Skipton. "Dear Skipton Resident" infers that living in Skipton means that the offer inside the envelope, is relevant to your status as a Skipton resident. Dear Skipton Resident invokes curiosity - you dont want to be the only local resident who doesn't discover what is on offer to the good folk of Skipton.

Moreover, this takes a positive step away from the often used ‘Dear Occupier’.

I mean, are you from the Council? Says nothing about your implied affluence status. But, Dear Skipton Resident, or close by Dear Ilkley Resident surely does.

For me, Dear Occupier is too impersonal and bureaucratic. It has little warmth or relevance as the letter is already addressed (with your actual address and postcode), so The Occupier is superfluous and adds nothing from an affluence perspective.

 

Use Your Product Category

Choosing to use your product or service category quickly singles out the household resident for whom the mailing is most relevant. The Furniture Lover may not exist at all in a household, but for the overwhelming majority, there will be someone who fits this billing.

Here are 20 collective name alternatives for Partially Addressed Mail targeting affluent households. Imagine the word Dear before the following...

  1. Luxury Connoisseur
  2. Elegant Homeowner
  3. Elite Traveler
  4. Gourmet Aficionado
  5. Fashion Enthusiast
  6. Art Collector
  7. Wellness Seeker
  8. Tech Savant
  9. Fine Wine Aficionado
  10. Fine Dining Devotee
  11. Philanthropy Advocate
  12. Exclusive Retreat Seeker
  13. Bespoke Lifestyle Lover
  14. Cultural Explorer
  15. Financial Savvy Investor
  16. Refined Tastemaker
  17. Classic Car Enthusiast
  18. Sustainable Living Advocate
  19. Global Citizen
  20. Timepiece Aficionado

Just how far you can extend these wide ranging descriptions is anyone’s guess. But, using collective names can arguably elevate a mailing’s appeal at least to the level of current low levels of typical personalisation use.

Collective names acknowledge people do perform roles in households, so test them out. There is no obligation to use the same salutation throughout your mailing, so you could split test, for example

Dear Fine Wine

Devotee
Aficionado
Savant

The most responsive salutation becomes the champion, against which in your next mailing you can test new challenger collective names.

 

Make a Formal Name Informal and Friendly

This is all about softening formality. Being friendly and to a degree writing in fun. So, Head of Household could be The Household Commander or Head of Most Things.

Your collective name choice will help minimise the drop in personal relevance, but admittedly will not eradicate it. It is advised that you test different collective names and track responses by this variant.

 

The Engagement Rate for Partially Addressed Mail is 88%

Your mailing is actually highly likely to be opened and read. Engaged with. So, ask yourself, is this radically different to personalised mail? Maybe a little, but not by that much. A few percentage points difference in response terms.

 

How to Reach Nearly All Wealthy Households

Critically, you will be able to reach more affluent households than simply using name and address lists.

This is true for the UK High Net Worth Database, a treasure trove database with names and addresses of high net worth and affluent individuals in the UK. My company Finely Fettled markets the data.

For some years, data vendors have filled in the gap between those households not on the Open Register (Electors Roll) and all households. This was done using various sources of third party data. With GDPR, such data is becoming less available.

Using the uplift figures from The UK High Net Worth Database, for every 100 names and addresses for your next affluent mailing campaign, you can get 225 addresses using Partially Addressed Mail.

It stands that those households in the increment have probably received less personalised direct mail. So, Partially Addressed provides a massive boost when marketing to the affluent.

 

How Does Partially Addressed Mail Work?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Partially Addressed Mail is just about lower postage prices. We’ll quantify that later, but the point you should consider is Partially Addressed Mail starts with a genuine profile of your existing customers.

The best thing you can do now is watch the video!

Hope you enjoyed the video!

Just to recap...

The process is that we target and rank all postcodes that are similar to your customers. First, because they literally live in the same postcode as your customers and second, because we use up to 30,000 different attributes and a geo-demographic profiling system to single out the best affluent households you can market to.

Our process ranks top-ups, the neighbours in the same postcode as your customers, and lookalikes, the postcodes containing households most like your existing customers.

Imagine a spreadsheet with the top cell A1 being the very best matching postcode to your customers and further down, cell A25000 being the worst. If we select all cells from top to, say, cell A6000, you’d have approximately a mailing containing the best 100,000 households available.

Now that's alot of affluent households!

 

What Will a Partially Addressed Mail Campaign Cost?

The first thing to note about Partially Addressed Mail is there is a minimum volume of 10,000 packs. A pack could be a postcard or a letter. The postcard will be cheaper.

 

Example Pack

  • 350gsm silk, matt laminate to face only.

What Costs are Included?

We have included Creative, Data, Print and Postage. So for the following volumes you have an estimated pack cost.

So, let's price a 50,000 Partially Addressed Mail campaign using Finely Fettled estimates:

  • Postage costs £11,000
  • Print costs £6500
  • Data & profile costs £4,600
  • Creative costs £600
    • TOTAL = £22,700 (45.4p per lead) + vat

 

Return on Investment

The Yorkshireman in me is saying, costs are one thing, but how much can be made from the campaign? The legal answer is that outcomes are not guaranteed. However, if you have a great offer on a product or service widely attractive to affluent individuals, and your call to action is about helping those people take the next step towards you, then you are in danger of doing just fine.

Let’s assume that your offer is priced to return £2,000 profit from a new customer in the first year. How many of these do you need to breakeven on a 50,000 Partially Addressed Mail campaign?

Calculation:

50,000 Partially addressed mail cost = £22,700 + vat

Therefore 12 sales would be required. That's a 0.024% conversion rate.

Let's assume you did rather better than that. Say, 0.15% conversion. That would be 75 sales and a 6.6 return on investment.

Direct mail response rates vary. For campaigns I help with, a response to mailing of 0.6% is regularly achieved for seminar mailings for example. Royal Mail are yet to go long on trial outcomes for this new service. That said, if Partially Addressed Mail was just 75% of this personalised direct mail response rate, your seminar would attract 225 people with a 6.7% convert to sale breakeven.

And if the conversion rate from seminar was slightly more ambitious at just 15%, new affluent customers would be recruited for £444 each, which for many affluent marketers would be an immediate buy.

Of course, you’ll want to do your own numbers. Please contact Graham Arrowsmith at Finely Fettled if you want help or simply wish to discuss your business case.

 

Why Not Just Send Door Drops?

From the affluent marketer’s viewpoint, door drops, or leaflet distribution is hampered by the need to order postcode sectors. For affluent targeting, you might only want to target 10% of roughly 3,000 households in a sector. That might be the best 20 postcodes that ideally describes your audience.

If you spend money getting to the rest who are not your market, then for 50,000 9p leaflets, your cost per affluent contact rises increases tenfold to acquire just affluent household leads. 

So, when you have two goals, to reach affluent customers and at the lowest possible cost, then Partially Addressed Mail is a very smart option. It does both.

 

A Word about GDPR

There is something of its time about writing without using a name. You are saying that you want your offer to be sufficiently compelling to the affluent household, that you want to earn the right to hold their name and the subsequent use of their data.

It’s more than being straight with the church clock, as my Dad used to say. This is a state of humility about thinking you can use a person’s data when that person might not have dealt with you beforehand.

GDPR facilitates the use of direct mail with names under the legitimate interest processing rules. Now, that might be sufficient legally, but morally, and perhaps more persuasively with intelligent sentient affluent households, recognising their importance starts with not knowing who they actually are by name. And by having a mindset that says you want to earn that right.

Summary and Next Steps

Partially Addressed Mail is the direct mail alternative for marketing to the affluent marketers. It is designed to fit between door drops and personalised direct mail.

As this article highlights, the affluent marketer can single out exactly the households they need cost effectively. The level of profiling is significant and sophisticated. Cost savings exist for data and postage.

If you are ready to start a discussion about using Partially Addressed Mail, get in touch directly on 01535 654930 or write to Graham Arrowsmith via contact@finelyfettled.co.uk. Thank you.