Loyalty New Zealand Limited manages Fly Buys, the largest loyalty programme in New Zealand. With over 1.2 million households in the programme, New Zealand Post's addressing changes looked like a huge compliance burden – until the company realised the wealth of customer insight possible with more accurate address data.
Laurence Chiu, Chief Information Officer for Loyalty New Zealand is adamant direct mail is as strong as ever - and they have the phone calls to prove it.
"Every quarter we post over 750,000 statements and rewards guides. And every quarter we gear up our Service Centre because we just know that as soon as that mail hits the phones go mad," says Laurence.
With this in mind, Loyalty New Zealand has been actively ensuring their address data will meet the new New Zealand Post standards. They were pleasantly surprised with the customer insight data available through the GeoPAF database available from New Zealand Post.
"Initially there was some scepticism within Loyalty New Zealand about the end result of this project," says Laurence. "Staff were concerned we would no longer be able to mail an address if it wasn't in the Postal Address File (PAF). This was a major consideration given the critical role of mail to our programme."
Laurence reassured them that this was not the case; addresses that could not be matched would still be mailable. The added benefit was the ability to leverage the data in GeoPAF.
The GeoPAF is an enhanced version of the PAF that matches main PAF with external databases from Statistics New Zealand and Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) to enable detailed demographic segmentation.
"We ran all our addresses through a cleansing and geo-coding process. This data, combined with our core data, gave us insights such as where members collect points, how far they will travel to earn their points, and where our members are clustered geographically.
The level of analysis is incredibly valuable to businesses that are part of the Fly Buys Programme. "We’ve already been helping these businesses with their marketing initiatives," says Laurence.
"Improved address data will not only ensure our statements and rewards catalogues are delivered to Fly Buys members efficiently, but we'll have the potential to allow participating businesses to personalise and tailor offerings even more," says Laurence. "It's great – we've gained all of this out of something that looked like compliance!"
Having realised the benefits of more accurate addressing data, Loyalty New Zealand is keen to utilise some of the other tools the industry has developed to ensure cleansed addresses stay accurate.
"We'll be working with our software providers to add online address validation to our website and into our Service Centre as soon as we can," says Laurence. "New Zealand Post has introduced a National Change of Address database that we'll be subscribing to so we can proactively manage address accuracy."
Laurence's philosophy on address data is clear.
"If you 'lose' a customer’s address, you lose the ability to communicate with them on a one-to-one level. This is critical to any marketing activity and the growth of any business. Take the opportunity now to get your address data up-to-date, but don't stop there – leverage the other information available to you as a result."