St Ives Direct Limited
Registered in England & Wales
No. 2451966
Registered office:
St Ives House, Lavington Street
London SE1 0NX

data services

database marketing

The aim of database marketing is to attract and retain customers in the most profitable way. It goes without saying that any business reliant on customer retention must constantly strive to stimulate its most valuable customers. Our database marketing expertise enables our clients to embrace every customer as an individual and to approach them with highly personalised and relevant offers. This helps them to:

• Select the most appropriate customers and prospects
• Develop the most relevant proposition
• Engage customers and prospects using the most appropriate vehicle or format
• Choose the most effective creative treatment.
Carefully designed and managed, the right type of database provides our clients with invaluable feedback on the effectiveness of their campaigns. Database marketing enables them to better understand their customers based on hard evidence, namely their spending patterns. This, in turn, allows our clients to develop strategies based on reliable analysis.

Armed with this knowledge, they are then better able to increase profitability by:

• Winning a greater number of new customers
• Discouraging customers from defecting
• Encouraging existing customers to spend more frequently or larger amounts when they do spend.

data storage & management

Our database management team is key to ensuring print quantities are carefully controlled and wastage minimised wherever possible. They specialise in collecting, formatting and managing every piece of data associated with client work. They carefully analyse this information to increase sales and more accurately target distribution on behalf of customers.

comprehensive database solution

More than ever before, accurate customer and prospect targeting is fundamental to the success of any direct marketing initiative. Without precise audience selection, even the most compelling creative campaign is unlikely to achieve its desired impact.

At St Ives Direct, we firmly believe that customer and prospect data is the single most precious resource – and one that holds the key to successful targeting.

For this reason, we’ve made it our business to turn data into a powerful marketing tool by helping clients develop a truly customer focused and well structured database. This enables them to transform what was previously just a list of names, addresses and other data into a priceless bank of marketing information.

Clients can then use this information to tailor their mailings with greater precision. It means they not only achieve better results from their existing customers and well-chosen prospects, but also reduce production costs by no longer wasting valuable resources on people who don’t respond. Moreover, properly structured data helps minimise their postal costs.

At a time when competition for ‘share of mind’ has never been greater, optimising response rates from prospective customers means finding the most effective route to market, while reducing the cost of acquisition. To help our clients achieve this, we offer a comprehensive database marketing service that provides all the necessary expertise and technology under one roof, enabling them to:

• Gain a true understanding of customers and their behaviour
• Target direct marketing initiatives where they are most likely to retain and nurture the most valued customers
• Develop strategies aimed at improving sales and profitability
• Create and manage single or multi-channel campaigns based on these strategies
• Capture recipients’ responses and thereby refine the productivity of future campaigns.

Our data management specialists collect, format and manage every piece of data associated with clients to help identify market trends and also ensure print quantities are carefully controlled and wastage minimised wherever possible. In short, we can provide every service clients require to support them and their creative agency – conveniently managed through a dedicated client account manager.

accuracy of data

In the final analysis, however, the strength of any marketing database lies in the detail - who prospects and customers are, where they live, what they’ve already bought and when? Having the right data and a marketing database linked to individual transactions means our clients can more readily link customers to those transactions.

Whatever database marketing requirements clients may have, St Ives Direct can tailor its services to meet those needs. In this way, clients derive greater value from their marketing database by targeting prospects and customers with more persuasive offers, while also reinforcing brand identity.

At the same time, it’s essential to ensure the accuracy of the data in any database, otherwise reports and analysis can be dangerously misleading. At St Ives Direct, we’re able to build and host both simple and complex relational databases. A rigorous development process enables us to create solutions tailored to clients’ individual needs and budget. What’s more, we have the in-depth experience required to build and migrate databases where required.

data optimisation

data cleansing

The key to effective direct marketing lies in good data management, which is why we take great care to ensure the integrity of our clients’ data by analysing or cleansing it where necessary. We also suppress and de-duplicate data for any client campaign that involves multiple data sources. These de-duplication and suppression routines are designed to ensure that any customer records are held only once, thereby avoiding inaccuracies in reports, analyses and campaigns.
Since we’re ISO 27001 accredited, clients can also be confident that all data processing, hygiene and manipulation is carried out in-house in a totally confidential manner. We also key and scan documents from customer loyalty programmes, questionnaires and other forms of data collection. What’s more, when executing campaigns, we screen data against services such as the Mailing Preference Service (MPS), Telephone Preference Service (TPS), The Xpression File (formally NSF), The Bereavement Register, Mortascreen, and the Gone Away Suppression (GAS) file among others.

response analysis

Thorough response analysis is the key to successful marketing. It is important to establish how various elements of a campaign performed and what effect they had on the ROI of the campaign as a whole. Many transactional response models rely on data being captured from the promotional material, such as reference numbers and source codes, which can reduce response rates or alienate a potential customer. We believe that it is essential to know where an order has originated, because simply analysing the responses from the most recent communication may not be sufficient.
The database marketing team at St Ives Direct has developed bespoke response analytics to help you make the right choices. We’ve taken response analytics to a different level by not only analysing responses from the latest promotion, but also exploring previous campaigns to identify the source of the order among potentially millions of names.

powerful matching techniques

St Ives Direct’s response management platform is designed to work without the need for unique reference numbers or barcodes on the marketing material, but simply by using powerful matching techniques to establish the relationship. Without relying on information presented on the promotional material, we can identify associated responses generated through the campaign in line with designated threshold criteria set at the development stage. For example, a daughter may respond to an offer intended for her mother, but our analytics are sufficiently intelligent to attribute the correct value of this to the campaign and improve the accuracy of the associated performance.
Our marketing reports are designed to reduce the amount of assumption used to make important decisions. The level of detail is such that the user can immediately evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign, while simple enough to identify the impact of data tests, creative tests and package offers. We also operate a bespoke tailoring service which allows specific requirements to be incorporated into the report, such as sales uplift and affiliate analysis.

improving customer insight

In today’s increasingly competitive market, it is vital to understand who your customers are, why they buy from you, and how you can use that insight to improve retention, response rates and ROI. The experience of our database team, coupled with our state-of-the-art analytic software, can provide you with that insight.
Marketing analytics

Our data analytics will help you maximise your existing customer relationships and improve acquisition. We can help you find additional sources of data by matching the profile of your most valued customers with that of available list rental data. We can then use our comprehensive range of modelling techniques to identify potential purchase trends and assist with effective data segmentation.
The ability to accurately segment your database can deliver business benefits such as:

• Targeted and cost-effective communications - delivering a higher ROI
• Identification of new opportunities or 'gaps'
• Delivery of relevant messages - improving customer satisfaction and propensity to buy
• A higher customer retention rate
• Predictive buying behaviour analysis

What’s more, when used in conjunction with our response analysis and database management facilities, segmentation can make dramatic improvements to targeting and ROI from customer acquisition campaigns.

data acquisition

St Ives has a wealth of in-house experience when it comes to sourcing new prospect data. Whether you’re building a marketing database or running a series of campaigns we can help.

When it comes to data acquisition, fishing in the same pond simply attracts the same fish and stocks are soon depleted. For this reason, St Ives Direct avoids being tied to specific list providers, which means we can supply data from a wide range of data partners and internally managed databases across any market sector or industry vertical.
Our analytics module can provide insight for sourcing accurately profiled data to match that of your most valued customers. Working in partnership with some of the largest list providers in the UK, we can provide a mix of prospect data from pools in excess of 50 million consumer records and some two million businesses.

In addition to the names and addresses of prospects, we can also provide hundreds of additional consumer attributes based on geography, personal information, household information and geo-demographics to provide a powerful and unparalleled targeting mix.