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Who's Using The
UK & Ireland Education Disc

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For most of our customers, whichever data product they purchase from us, it's the very first time they've bought in sales data for their company. If that describes you, here's what you should look out for with mailing lists, including the UK & Ireland Education Disc.

With every database, whether it's the UK & Ireland Education Disc or any data services you buy from any other company, there will be mistakes on it. There are two reasons why this happens - a) a change in a school or business happens between the update cycle and b) human error when the information is entered onto the database.

Out of the 10,000+ marketing companies in the UK, Meridian Delta is one of only 900 members of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

As DMA members, we must comply with not only the laws surrounding marketing but additional association rules and good practice guidelines. See how the UK Education Disc compares to the DMA rules.

Please click here to see the current terms and conditions for the UK & Ireland Education Disc.

The UK & Ireland Education Disc is the most popular method of getting in touch with schools. We believe it's because it's the best priced and the most accurate. Order a free sample of schools in your local area.

Name

Company

Telephone

Email

Area?

During our trial run for shared mailings from September 2008 to July 2009, we used only the UK & Ireland Education Data to post to schools as part of the service.

Less than 1% of the addresses came back as not recognised. For a truly fair measure however, we have included the number of schools which asked to be removed from the service to take us to an accuracy rate of 98%.

For customers new to mailing to schools, around 1.5% of schools could write back to you asking to be taken from your mailing list. It is best practice to do this. Schools ask to be removed for a variety of reasons, the main one of which we noticed was the desire to reduce the amount of leaflets coming into schools for environmental reasons.

Meridian Delta is resting its shared mailing service for a few months after the beginning of the new term to assess customer feedback. Thank you to all the 215 UK & Ireland Education Disc customers who were part of the trial service.

Although only used by a small minority of the UK Education Disc customers (around 10% according to customer service calls made and received), the email side of the database is very important for some customers.

Email deliverability is enormously difficult to get right. You can have exactly the same database - like the UK & Ireland Education Disc - and get a 40-50% deliverability rate on Microsoft Outlook but 89% when you use the email marketing program bundled free with this product.

The last customer test on the data (using a third party service provider in the week beginning 15th June 2009) showed 89% deliverability as well across the entire database product.

Meridian Delta offers a whole-database deliverability guarantee of 85% with the UK & Ireland Education Disc when you use the email marketing program provided.

Telephone and fax numbers change surprisingly frequently and, because of this, the DMA offers no minimum accuracy guideline to its members.

However, we feel that customers should be confident in what they purchase so we offer a 95% guarantee across the entire database for correct numbers. We aim to offer a 99% guarantee by the end of 2009.

Fax numbers are very difficult to get in major numbers primarily because of the effect of the Fax Preference Service (FPS). Unfortunately, because of this and other mitigating factors, we are unable to offer a minimum accuracy guarantee on fax numbers.

Although the vast majority of other supporting information on the disc is correct, we are currently unable to offer guarantees against other data fields. As a company, this is something we are constantly working on so please keep checking with us for the very latest information.

Since the launch of the UK & Ireland Education Disc in 2005, customers have been crucial in helping us keep the data up to date and developing the product. It was customers' suggestions that made us expand the disc from the initial 29,000 establishments to 65,000. It was also working with customers that helped us develop the free technical and advertising back-up services, write the included email marketing program in-house from scratch and more. Without your input, the product would not be the fully featured marketing package it is today - it would be more like just a database..

We get corrections, suggestions and feedback from customers on a daily basis. If you spot anything wrong with the data and you'd like us to correct it, or you want to suggest new features for the product, please get in touch with your account manager.

If this is the first time you're buying data, make sure you buy it from a company that will guarantee the quality of what it offers. Most companies don't and we understand why - database collation and maintenance is difficult.

Pro-rata refund offer - we're the only school marketing data company to guarantee its own quality.

We will offer all customers a pro-rata refund on their data if it does not perform to the deliverability guarantee. Email addresses are excluded from this offer if you do not use our email marketing program nor send back a diagnostics log from the program to us.

To qualify, you need to try to have contacted over 5,000 of the records on the UK & Ireland Education Disc by any method as part of a single marketing campaign. Why 5,000? This represents over 8% of the database and it is around that level that certain assumptions can be made across the entire dataset and not just a limited subset.

If, for example, you only get a 94% telephone connection against our 95% minimum guarantee, you'll be refunded 1% of the purchase price. If you get a 96% delivery rate on mailshots (excluding requests for removal) against the 98% minimum guarantee, you'll be refunded 2% of the purchase price and so on. The refund will the difference between your success rate and the minimum guarantee offered. The pro-rata refund system also applies to email addresses - the only condition attached to this is that you have to use the email marketing program we supply and send back a diagnostics log from the program to us.

What we need from you to be able to process your pro-rata refund is the following -

• Postal addresses - the actual returned envelopes sent to you which state "No longer at this address" and the full list of the schools you sent your mail to (remember there is a minimum of 5,000 schools you'll need to mail to in order to represent a fair sample of the database). In addition to the pro-rata refund, we will also refund you the money you spend in posting the returned envelopes to us plus £10 for your time.
• Email addresses - a copy of the email you sent out together with your diagnostics log and the list of 5,000+ schools you tried to email. If, after we've tried to remedy the situation by checking for optimum connectivity and email design suitability, you still don't achieve over 85% deliverability, we'll issue you a pro-rata refund plus £10 for your time.
• Telephone numbers - we'll need to see the names of the 5,000+ schools you tried to contact and the numbers which were wrong. We'll then give you your pro-rata refund plus £10 for your time.

Always make sure that, when you're buying school marketing data at whatever the price, you get quality guarantees. Other companies can charge £1,000s for this data - make sure that you ask all the questions you can of potential suppliers. As members of the DMA, we ARE answerable to an outside authority about the quality of the services we offer.