Who are Nightingales?

Now 30 years old, Nightingales markets a range of high quality ladies' clothing for its mature, discerning customers through four main channels, the website nightingales.com, its own friendly call centre, its 'Stone by Nightingales' product range and fifteen retail outlets across the UK.

Streamlining contact data with Experian QAS & Sanderson

In the past, Nightingales relied heavily on third party bureaux to clean and maintain its 700,000 record customer database. This was a costly exercise, given that the company sent out a total of 3.6 million catalogues in 10 separate mailings each year. It also meant that Nightingales had to rely on its third party mailing house to append data and highlight returned catalogues from customers who had moved. Nightingales were also receiving 36,000 returned catalogues per year so there were obvious data quality issues.

Nightingales looked to technology partner, Sanderson, to recommend ways to enhance its business processes, who suggested several projects to improve data quality and the customer experience.

Implementing a Rented Mailing List module was the first task to be undertaken. With the aim of expanding the business, Nightingales began buying in additional mailing lists to target new prospects. The Sanderson Mail Order system is also used to capture customer details from new orders, catalogue requests and enquiries. It also enables Nightingales to buy/sell names or rent them for multiple use.

Bringing data cleaning in-house

Sanderson engaged with long term business partner QAS to tackle the data quality issues. QAS Batch with Suppression was implemented to improve data quality within the existing customer database and the new Rented Mailing List module. This, in turn, would have a positive impact on the segmentation and reporting structure.

Deploying the system enabled Nightingales to take control and ownership of its data cleansing. Customer contact data can be validated and updated to reflect changes in address or to remove deceased contacts. It places the database management tools in the hands of the marketer, database manager or IT specialist. This reduces the need for unnecessary external help and brings down costs.

How did Nightingales benefit?

Nightingales ran QAS Batch with Suppression against its 700,000 customer records and identified that over 200,000 were inaccurate. The records were cleaned using QAS Batch, which updated the postcodes, added missing address elements such as forenames and surnames, corrected spelling mistakes and sorted the fields into a consistent format. The file was then matched against Experian's Mortality suppressions, Mortascreen's Mortalities and the National Change of Address (NCOA) register.

The results were excellent. 3,800 records were found on the Mortality file and 8,300 matched against Mortascreen. It was calculated that removing these contacts would save Nightingales around £60,000 a year in wasted mailings. It would also prevent damage to its brand reputation as continually mailing the deceased can have a negative impact on their grieving family.

Nightingales also found 24,969 records on the NCOA register and were able to correct these addresses and send out new catalogues. In a couple of months, this resulted in new orders generating in excess of £71,000 of revenue. These were all sales from customers Nightingales would have lost contact with if they had not deployed QAS Batch with Suppression.

Nightingales' original customer database, which was around 90% accurate, is now approximately 99% accurate. Having clean data helps Nightingales to reduce waste and improve the efficiency of its marketing campaigns. Previously, response rates to marketing campaigns were around 2% but since using QAS Batch with Suppression, 5% of mailings now result in an order.

Future plans to improve data quality

Nightingales subsequently purchased QAS Mailsort with Price in Proportion, which it plans to run on future mailings to take advantage of Royal Mail discounts. It has also purchased further suppression services prior to each mailing for Goneaways and Mailing Preference Services on its full database.

In addition, Nightingales plans to improve the efficiency of its list buying process. QAS Batch with Suppression will enable it to validate the accuracy of data from list providers before it goes ahead with the purchase. Previously, 1.5 million prospect records were purchased annually and this has now been reduced by two thirds as Nightingales can return lists or demand discounts if the data is not as accurate as promised.

Nightingales is also planning to earn extra revenue by selling on its data (when it has consent to do so from the consumer) and can do so in the confidence that it is clean, suppressed and up to date.