About us

What IS Address Intelligence

I think I speak for 90% of our team when I say that I get asked this question outside of work, a lot. When you work for a business that has a genuinely unique approach to data and marketing, trying to explain to your mum, housemate, partner or pub landlord what you do for a living isn’t always as simple as it sounds. So, summing it up seemed like a good place to start for our first post.

Traditional marketing involves a bit of guesswork, a bit of luck and a lot of wastage.

Most businesses use a few different channels - print, digital, television, out of home and so on. They tend to choose them based on the likelihood that their target audience will see them. For example, choosing a newspaper where two-thirds of readers are estimated to be full time employed, living in a city, medium to high income and so on. This works reasonably well if the product or service you’re promoting is relevant to most people. Think McDonalds, Tesco, Coca Cola - their customers could be an 18 year old student or a 55 year old company director earning £100k+ a year.

However, for businesses who have a more niche demographic to target, the % of wastage in these channels increases considerably as more and more of the people they reach aren’t relevant for them, and vice versa.

That’s where data comes in. Since the dawn of ‘big data’, companies have been able to target their advertising to specific demographic profiles and, in turn, provide more compelling and relevant offers to entice them. Targeting social or digital media by postcode, for example, allows them to reach individuals in areas where lots of people ‘look’ like their existing customers.

The issue is, for most businesses even this approach still involves reaching lots of people that aren’t their target profile and lots who are already a loyal customer. In ‘door drop’ marketing, for example, they still have to deliver their campaign to every household in a postal sector (that’s approximately 2,600 households), even if half of those are existing customers. With newspaper advertising, they have no way of knowing for sure who saw their advert and again, no way of avoiding their existing customers.

Our approach to marketing is very different. We help businesses to understand their existing customers better by profiling their database.

We use that insight to create a detailed targeting profile and using our live residential database, we find others who match that. We use direct mail as our main output channel because it allows for removal of all existing customers and all individuals who have requested not to be contacted by the business. This means that the campaign delivered only reaches relevant households and can carry a specific new customer offer or call-to-action that has real value to the recipients.

We provide an end-to-end service which means our clients don’t have to worry about anything. From designing the campaign (flyers, brochures, pop-up houses - we’ve done it all!), to printing and posting it, we take care of every step.

Then, after the campaign has finished we analyse new customer data to determine who responded and why. This post-campaign analysis allows us to provide valuable insight to measure ROI and to refine targeting for future campaigns. We are obsessed with getting our clients the best possible results so this step in the process is crucial as it allows us to improve every campaign and drive up ROI.

So the simple answer to the question is:

We help businesses to find and reach new customers using targeted and cost-effective direct mail.

But that would have been a pretty short first post. And it wouldn’t explain that our capabilities don’t just stop at direct mail. Did I mention that we can use our live database and insights to help businesses improve targeting for their digital, social out of home and television marketing too? No? Well, maybe that’s one for next time. Until then, if you want to find out more, speak to our amazing, friendly team today.

And incidentally, if my mum asks, I help businesses send cool flyers to people who actually want to receive them.