01 August 2012
Authors
Lisa Schutz, General Manager PostConnect and marketing strategist and sales professional, Graham Plant.
Background
IBM recently reported that "every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - so much that 90 per cent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone." The challenge is to harness big data for highly segmented marketing activity that will drive better returns on marketing spend.
Challenge
Schutz and Plant contend that technology can help businesses cope with big data volume, variety and velocity. The challenge lies in integrating data from different sources to provide a single, true view of a customer across channel and time.
Solution
A physical address remains one of the most reliable ways to match customer data across different data sets. Australia Post developed the Personal Address File (PAF) - a set of industry standards for matching, storing and managing customer data.
Results
When Australia Post released the PAF, many customer databases were so poor they were achieving matches of only around 60 per cent. Today, most customer databases that have been regular users of the PAF, via AMAS-accredited software, achieve around 95 per cent accuracy in their matching.
