Direct Mail and CRM Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

Direct and CRM marketing knows more about its recipients than any other discipline and uses that knowledge in ways that regularly misfire. A database contains a name, a purchase history, a lifecycle stage and a set of inferred attributes; a campaign built on those fields reaches a customer whose circumstances have changed, whose relative died, who returned the product, or who is being congratulated on an anniversary of something they would rather forget. The apology costs more than the campaign earned.

We edit what direct mail, CRM and lifecycle marketing agencies produce — direct mail packs and letters, personalisation and dynamic content rules, segmentation strategy and audience definitions, lifecycle and trigger programme documentation, email and SMS sequences within a CRM programme, data capture and preference centre copy, consent and permission wording, suppression and exclusion rules, win-back and lapsed customer campaigns, loyalty programme communications, testing plans and results documentation, response handling and fulfilment copy, and client reporting on programme performance. Our editors work on the rules as well as the copy.

Personalisation rules are where CRM does its damage, and the failures are systematic rather than random. Campaigns are specified by what should trigger them and almost never by what should suppress them. We work on these so every trigger carries its suppression list — recent complaint, open service issue, bereavement flag, return in progress, opted out of this theme specifically, contacted within the cooling period; so fields used in copy are checked for what they contain when they are empty or wrong, because "Dear " and "Happy anniversary of your first purchase, Mrs Deceased" are the ones that get screenshotted; so any inferred attribute used in visible copy is treated more cautiously than a stated one, since a customer told their inferred life stage discovers what the company assumes about them; and so themed campaigns — baby, wedding, bereavement, health — carry a standing opt-out that is offered before the campaign rather than after the first send. These rules are not copywriting and they determine whether the copy ever gets read charitably.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including customer data descriptions, campaign material and results. We are editors rather than data protection or CRM strategy advisers, and we offer no view on consent requirements, data handling or programme design. What we can do is make the copy work and the rules around it think about what could go wrong.