Epsilon just published a study showing that even in the age of smartphones and tablets, customers prefer receiving much of their information by direct mail. When it comes to receiving information about financial services in particular,  38 percent of the U.S. households surveyed preferred receiving information through postal mail. They preferred postal mail twice as much as Internet communications in general (17%). Email was preferred only a lowly 7% of the time. (For more about the study, click here.)

This Epsilon study is yet another reminder of how important it is to collect accurate address data from customers. There’s no better time to do this than during the account creation process when your customer is sitting face-to-face with a branch employee. Yet whether because of keyboard errors or outdated information on government-issued IDs, financial institutions end up with incorrect address data from these interviews too much of the time.

Bankers tell us that as much as 5% of their postal mail communications are returned because of address errors. That’s 5% of customers who never receive the institution’s direct mail pieces, no matter how well they’re designed or how compelling their offers.

For a lot of reasons—including getting the most out of future marketing campaigns—it pays to use a real-time identity verification service that corrects address information in real time.

If you’d like to see a demo of our Accelerated Insight service doing just that, please contact us.