Fast Track Content from Author to Reader: Collaborative workflow management systems that work

Rahul Arora, Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited, draws on many years’ experience, including the development of MPSTrak, a core component of their flagship cloud-based Digital Publishing Platform – DigiCore – that streamlines, automates, and optimizes the publishing process.

In this guest post he considers the need to implement a collaborative workflow management system to manage the complete author-to-reader value chain, and the associated benefits for publishers.

"A publishing workflow is a sequence of activities performed by individuals or groups to make the content available to the reader. Participation is required from the author, editorial team, reviewers, and production staff; with the publisher managing and owning the complete process in near real time.

In the past seven to eight years, much has changed in publishing workflow management. New technology, publishing models, workflows, demand from authors, and growing competition have created a demand for increased automation, efficiency, standardization, faster publishing, global visibility, and cost savings.

Publishers need a flexible and adaptable publishing workflow management system that deals with any existing multiplicity in publishing processes without creating any echo, supports future business workflow requirements, provides global visibility, and allows the business to make any required changes with no or minimum dependency on the technology team.

We have seen publishers struggling with various challenges in their workflows: repetitive data entry in different systems, inadequate data validation, no control on processes, challenges in managing user notifications and reminders, tracking work from author and providing visibility on work status, article-based or custom publishing, issue make-up, schedule management, managing payments, and integrating different internal and external components.

In some cases, publishers had over 30 production workflows, with more than 80% repetition in data entry. The resultant issues and productivity inhibitors with apparently simple looking processes would see staff doing something in a far more complex way than was necessary.

When we start to work with clients, we always carry out a “workflow discovery” workshop at the start of each system implementation. Invariably we find that many times staff don’t have a strong rationale behind following the existing process steps. The response to most of questions turns out to be “Someone asked us to do this way and we never thought too deeply about it”. In addition, there are always loose boundaries between editorial and production work and different teams doing the same things in different ways.

We recommend publishers adopt an automated workflow system through a capable and experienced partner without waiting for the struggle to peak and creating barriers in growth.

Because one thing remains true: successful organizations, the ones that ‘disrupt’ the old guard, are the ones that have figured out an end-to-end creative process that enables them to beat their competition.

The major things to consider are the platform’s flexibility to incorporate changes and a knowledgeable team that can lead and drive change. We advise clients to expect:

• Intuitive user interface with global visibility across the publishing process 
• Faster time to market 
• Increased transparency between publishing process stakeholders 
• Support for flexible business models 
• Increase in staff work handling capacity.

We were delighted to hear from one of our customers who reported absorption of three year growth in production volume without adding any production staff when they implemented MPSTrak. Another reported a 46% increase in article-handling capacity of a production editor. Whichever system you work with, make sure it helps you deliver the capacity, flexibility and adaptability to deal with an increasingly complex publishing workflow."

Rahul Arora is the Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited. He graduated from Babson College, Massachusetts and has a MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Rahul led the transformation of his family’s print-focused publishing business to a larger, professionally-driven B2B media enterprise. He has led and grown some of Gallup’s most innovative consulting partnerships in the APAC region. As CEO of MPS, he manages the current operations in India and the United States, while continuing to actively engage with their client base.

MPS Limited has provided platforms and services for content creation, full-service production, and distribution for over 46 years. The business division, MPS Technologies, is a leading partner for global publishers and caters to the rapidly changing technological requirements of the publishing workflow. MPSTrak is a core component of their flagship cloud-based Digital Publishing Platform – DigiCore – that streamlines, automates, and optimizes the publishing process.

MPS Limited are sponsoring the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference 14-16 September. Book now and follow #alpsp16 #alpspawards for details.

Spotlight on SAGE Publishing's An Adventure in Statistics by Andy Field - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

This is the penultimate post in a series of interviews with the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists.

Mark Kavanagh from SAGE Publishing talks about An Adventure in Statistics.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

Traditional methods of teaching and learning are in flux, partly because attention in the digital age is a scarce resource and engaging students is an increasing challenge. When Andy Field presented his ideas for a new approach to writing a textbook, we saw the opportunity to promote innovation within our textbook programme, specifically using Research Methods as our sandpit to play with pedagogy and better understand student engagement and learning styles.

A reinvention of the classic textbook model, An Adventure in Statistics demonstrates SAGE’s commitment to putting the authorial voice, ideas and talents at the heart of what we do, and to responding to the changing needs of students today.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

It is designed to work in the same way any textbook would. There are chapters on all the key areas covered on typical introductory statistics courses, there are pedagogical features throughout, and there is an online website offering complementary teaching and learning resources.

Where it departs from the traditional textbook model is in conveying statistical concepts through the interactions of characters in a novel length story – a science fiction love story in which Zach searches for his beloved Alice in a futuristic world, where every character he meets in his quest wants to teach him stats!

Great focus was placed both on the visual and story elements of the text to ensure that it worked as ‘academic fiction’. Andy always had the student reader firmly in mind from the beginning, but when he delivered the script, the SAGE product development team adopted a “bottom up”, user focused review process to better learn how this unique approach worked in practice, to build up student testimonials, and to help create more innovative sales and marketing strategies.

Andy engaged an Illustrator – James Iles, of Doctor Who fame – who helped initiate bringing the story to life. In house, Ian Antcliff worked on creating a design consistent with the artwork, adding value to the visual experience.


The array of illustrations bring another dimension to the figures, tables and pedagogy scattered throughout the book, fully immersing students into Zach’s world and making a one of a kind reading and learning experience.

In addition Andy worked with fiction editor, Gillian Stern, who provided feedback on the story elements of the text, helping to release Andy’s hitherto latent literary talents.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

An Adventure in Statistics rethinks the way that knowledge can be acquired, embedding statistical concepts into a highly illustrated, fictional narrative to motivate student learning. Using the medium of a science fiction love-story – not explored within teaching before – Andy have taken a creative approach to a long established model to create a more effective learning experience.

We’ve invested significantly in adapting a traditional model and format of dissemination to appeal both to changing learning styles and the ways in which students want to engage with educational content. It puts the reader at the centre, challenging their preconceptions about style and learning habits, appealing to their creative nature, demystifying content and teaching through a novel format.

In addition the story element of the product gives us much more scope to play with new ways of engaging students via social media, fostering and sustaining “fandom” and product discoverability.

An Adventure in Statistics is the expression of Andy’s vision for better engaging students and symbolises our willingness to invest significantly in the ideas of those at the forefront of HE teaching.

What are your plans for the future?

An Adventure in Statistics represents our most far reaching foray into understanding better student engagement, but we’re undertaking a range of innovation in pedagogy initiatives of varying scale throughout our textbook publishing programme. Adopting the “digital” mind-set of learning by doing and iterating, we’re conducting a series meaningful experiments across print and digital to learn more about how to be as relevant as possible to students at a time when they are increasingly influential in what teaching material they use.

Tell us a bit about your company.

SAGE Publishing is a leading independent academic and professional publisher founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune. SAGE is widely credited with helping to found early fields in Research Methods, and over its 50 year history has developed to further support the field in academic content, teaching resources, and innovative new products (e.g. SAGE Video Research Methods). We are committed to continuing our tradition of innovation within the Research Methods sphere, and the new textbook by award winning author Andy Field is a key example of how SAGE’s textbooks are breaking the mould of pedagogy, research methods and teaching.

This post was updated 5 September 2016.

Mark Kavanagh is Executive Publisher at SAGE Publishing. You can watch Mark present during the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing lightning sessions at the Conference in September, where the winners will be announced. Further information and booking available online.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.

Spotlight on ORCID - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing shortlist. Laure Haak from ORCID tells us more about their work.

Tell us a bit about your company.

ORCID is an independent non-profit organization that was founded by and for the research community. Our vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time. We aim to achieve this vision by providing an open registry where individuals may obtain a unique identifier they may use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. We also provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

We actually submitted our whole organization for consideration for the Award! We highlighted a few specific projects that we believe demonstrate innovation in publishing. These included:

• Recognizing peer review. Organizations may use ORCID iDs and APIs to more publicly acknowledge the contributions of their reviewers and editors. This functionality, launched in summer 2015, started with a CASRAI community working group co-chaired by ORCID and F1000 to define how to cite peer review, and developed into a pilot project collaboration with publishers to test out the data model and API-based workflow. Now, a number of organizations - publishers, funders, and system providers - are collecting ORCID iDs of reviewers and editors and, with their permission, integrating these identifiers with information about the review and using APIs to connect it all to the reviewer’s ORCID record. The information added can be very sparse (for double blind peer review) or complete (for fully open peer review) or anything in between. In keeping with ORCID's commitment to user control, an individual may make this information visible, private, or share it only with specific parties such as their employer or funding organization. It increases the visibility of - and ultimately, recognition for - the substantial contributions that peer reviewers make to the research process.

• Auto-Updating Researcher Records. In collaboration with Crossref and DataCite, we have worked with the publishing community to connect contributors and streamline the flow of information about journal articles and datasets from the point of submission to the contributor’s ORCID record. This not only significantly decreases the reporting burden on contributors but also creates an automated workflow for managing metadata updates from one source record. Connecting the dots has required work with publishers and data centers to ensure submission and production systems can collect ORCID iDs, and include them in their metadata deposits to Crossref and/or DataCite. In turn, Crossref and DataCite have worked with ORCID to create a workflow and notification service for ORCID record-holders to manage permissions for the update process. Now, authors and contributors need only use their iD when they submit a work, and provide permission once to Crossref and/or DataCite, and their ORCID record will be automatically updated with information when their work is made public. Auto-update was a huge collaborative effort and a big step towards our goal of 'Enter once, re-use often'.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

As a community-led organization, our projects involve a deep collaboration with the research community and across teams at ORCID - communications and support, technical operations, membership, back office operations, and strategy. For peer review, we engaged in a formal community working group process to define the data model for citing a peer review activity, tested this model with Early Adopters before launching formally, and spearheaded Peer Review Week to monitor community engagement and adoption of this functionality. For Auto-Update, we engaged directly with Crossref and DataCite to design and test notification processes and, through those organizations, with their communities to define processes for metadata deposits.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

These two projects illustrate how we can think - and act - beyond the traditional workflow “box”; in this case, of journal article citations. Review and indexing are critical factors in publishing but have typically been treated as “back office” activities. At the same time, the community is concerned about the decreasing participation in peer review activities, and the difficulty in maintaining metadata quality across the research ecosystem. Working with the community, we have created workflows that enable peer review activities to be cited - and that incentivize participation. Similarly, we have created workflows that enable interoperability between data systems - and sharing of high-quality metadata. These projects demonstrate how we help the community work together to innovate and build solutions for long-standing challenges in publishing - and other research - workflows.

What are your plans for the future?

In addition to peer review and autoupdate projects, we are currently working with the community to support acknowledgement of contributor roles, to enhance the identity management process, to clarify the processing of unique identifiers in the article publishing process, to improve the identification of organizations, and have just launched a community project on use of ORCID iDs in book publishing workflows.

Laure Haak is Executive Director at ORCID.

You can watch ORCID present during the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing lightning sessions at the Conference in September, where the winners will be announced. Further information and booking available online.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.

Spotlight on the Crossref Metadata API - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

This is the third in a series of interviews with the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing shortlist. Ginny Hendricks from Crossref tells us more about their Metadata API.

Tell us a bit about your company.

Crossref is a not-for-profit membership organization for scholarly publishing working to make content easy to find, cite, link, assess, and re-use. We do it in five ways: rallying the community; tagging metadata; running a shared infrastructure; playing with new technology; and making tools and services to improve research communications.

We’ve been around for sixteen years primarily for storing and registering identifiers that enable persistent linking between research articles. We’ve since grown to almost 6000 publisher members. This makes us not so much a Start-up as a ‘Scale-up’. We are seeing over 150 new publishers joining every month, international in scope and location, and many of these are library publishers, scholar publishers, and organizations exploring new publishing models.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

It’s the Crossref Metadata API, which is becoming a significant focus for us. We always describe APIs as machine-to-machine interfaces, but as more of us, including researchers, grow our developer mind-set, more of the services that we and others build need a dynamic way to integrate and use the cross-publisher metadata registered by Crossref. Put simply, the API lets anyone search, filter, facet and sample Crossref metadata related to over 80 million content items with unique Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs).

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

We’re a small team of fewer than thirty people total, about a third in Oxford, UK and two thirds in Boston, USA. This, like most Crossref initiatives, started with the R&D team led by Geoffrey Bilder and has been extensively developed by Karl Ward.

The API was initially conceived to support funders who wanted to be able to find and report on the outputs of the research they funded. This was information publishers had started to provide Crossref, but to make best use of it, funders need to be able to access the most up-to-date information from publishers to be able to filter and facet their searches to look for specific subsets of information to report on the KPIs they were interested in.

Then it grew - with the introduction of funding data we started to see the API being used extensively. Coupled with that, the increased breadth of the metadata that publishers can provide Crossref with has also been growing - letting it be interrogated and used in lots of interesting ways. As such, the API has been developed to support the different information that users might ask of the metadata: asking for things like licence information, ORCID iDs, full-text links, clinical trial numbers and being able to filter on and combine these to get the specific sub-set of data they’re looking for.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

For its openness, its wide applicability, and it’s growing user base. Also because it’s used solely by developers who are looking to innovate themselves. As a communications person it’s been really interesting to see how the developer community has engaged with the API. The kind of use cases we’re seeing include text-mining, simple reporting and tracking, notification services, search interfaces (including our own) and integration in online editing and blogging tools.

What are your plans for the future?

Robustness! We have plans to scale up the technology to handle the growing usage the API is experiencing and make sure we can wholeheartedly support and grow the community that is using it. Of course, the API is only as valuable as the information that publishers provide Crossref with, and we’ll also be encouraging publishers to deposit the best, most complete metadata they can to improve the discoverability and usability of the research they publish.

Ginny Hendricks is Director of Member & Community Outreach at Crossref.

You can watch Crossref present during the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing lightning sessions at the Conference in September, where the winners will be announced. Further information and booking available online.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.

Spotlight on Cartoon Abstracts - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

Ben Hudson, at work, visualising research

In this, the second in a series of interviews with the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing shortlist, we talk to Ben Hudson from Taylor & Francis about Cartoon Abstracts.

Tell us a bit about your company

I work as a marketer in the journals division of Taylor & Francis. We’ve been cultivating knowledge since 1798.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

Cartoon Abstracts, which are a fun new way of visualising academic research. These act primarily as a marketing tool, and are making a big impact on social media as well as having other applications.

See the cartoons for yourself at www.cartoonabstracts.com.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

Marketers are already using many different ways to promote individual research articles, and attracting the attention of an audience is an ever-evolving challenge.

I wanted to create something that stands out from the crowd, so I worked with a number of illustrators to combine the storytelling of a good press release with the highly visual nature of infographics. The end result is both concise and engaging – perfect for today’s marketing environment.

Once created, individual cartoon abstracts are promoted by T&F through social media, online, and via email. In addition, printed comics are proving very popular as a conference giveaway.

The original authors are provided with printed posters of their cartoon. These can be used at the authors’ place of work, at conferences, or even in poster sessions. Authors are also encouraged to self-promote their cartoon abstract through blogs and social media.

This combined promotion generates significant downloads and fantastic PR for the original research articles. This also increases the potential for citations.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

Each individual cartoon abstract summarises the original authors’ work through illustration, harnessing the overwhelming power of images over text.

Illustrations can aid the understanding of difficult concepts, broaden the appeal of niche topics, and transcend language barriers.

Authors enjoy being included as characters, which encourages them to share their cartoon via their own networks, thus increasing our communications reach. The author characters also resonate with the audience.

Elements of humour, intrigue, and parody can be found throughout many of the cartoons, which further increases audience engagement.

Cartoon Abstracts truly has gone viral, winning resounding organic praise from the academic community and beyond.

What are your plans for the future?

Cartoon Abstracts continues to gain exposure and awareness in the wider community, bringing written research to new audiences. I would like the concept to inspire not only current academics, but also the academics of tomorrow. As stated in the cartoon abstract Are Comics a Good Medium for Science Communication?, “Science comics have the potential to develop lay people’s ongoing interest and enjoyment for science”.

Ben Hudson is Associate Marketing Manager at Taylor & Francis and Founding Editor of Cartoon Abstracts. Watch him present during the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing lightning sessions at the Conference in September, where the winners will be announced. Further information and booking available online.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Ltd. 

Spotlight on Knowledge Unlatched - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

The shortlist for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by MPS Limited, has been announced. In a series of posts leading up to the Awards ceremony at the conference in September, we will focus on each project. Don't forget the shortlist will present in  lightning sessions at the ALPSP Conference. Haven't got your ticket yet? Book here.

First up is Dr Frances Pinter, Founder of Knowledge Unlatched.

Tell us a bit about your company.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) grew out of a conundrum. How could the decreasing print runs and increase of prices of monographs be good for scholarly communications? The digital sales were simply replacing the print sales to an ever decreasing number of institutions and did little to expand readership. So, what was to be done? We found a way to effectively ‘crowd-source’ the funding of the fixed costs of producing a book (getting to first digital copy costs) from a global network of libraries in exchange for putting the books online free to everyone in the world - Open Access on a Creative Commons license. Publishers continue to sell the books in other formats.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

There was no single project submitted for the awards. We focused on the fact that we are now scaling – able to offer hundreds of books per annum rather than just tens of books. We’ve also set up a backlist programme to complement the frontlist offers. Another piece of big news was the introduction of KU Research, a new arm that we established to conduct research into usage and impact of OA books. KU Research is a good place to brainstorm through some of the variations on the basic KU model before we introduce them into the market. We’ve set our own research agenda, already won a competitive award from the EU, are carrying out commissioned research for others and collaborate with other initiatives around the world.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

The core business of KU is to ‘unlatch’ books and soon journals, i.e. make it possible for high quality, peer reviewed, scholarly works to reach everyone with an interest in that particular work. The main model can best be shown by the diagram below. We ask librarians to guide us all the way; they are in control as the funding comes primarily from their budgets.

The team is global. Three continental nationalities are represented out of our Berlin office where operations, sales and marketing occur and two Brits in the UK (though I am originally American). KU Research is run out of Perth, Australia where we also have a Turkish researcher. We now have a small base with a research fellow inside the University of Michigan Library. Representation on a number of boards and committees is also global.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

Publishers have always relied on selling one unit at a time. Whether it is a book or a journal subscription to a library or an individual, or now an APC for an article based service. The concept of crowd-sourcing for a product is new – with the KU model having potentially a profound impact on the cash flow for publishers. KU changes where payments are made in the value chain and does so by having created a unique balance of interests between publishers and librarians. Publishers get money in earlier while the cost of the product to participating libraries is less than an equivalent closed publication.

What are your plans for the future?

In 2018 we will be presenting our first suite of journals for unlatching. The model has to be tweaked slightly in order to ensure sustainability, but it is not dissimilar to the books model. We are also working on projects that will have multiple sources of funding. In 2018 we will launch a book series that will have funding support from three sources - the learned society that originated the project, specialist research institutes that are active in that field and a wider group of libraries. KU’s job will be to coordinate this.

We’ll also be focusing on expanding the work of KU Research.


Dr Frances Pinter is the Founder and Ambassador for Knowledge Unlatched.  She is a serial entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of innovation in the publishing industry for nearly forty years. She is passionate about books, and about the potential of new technology to increase access to knowledge.

The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by MPS Limited, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference, Park Inn Heathrow London. Book you ticket now.

10 ways to do database marketing badly (and how to avoid them)

There's nothing quite like a summer birthday, is there? ALPSP member DataSalon are celebrating 10 years of helping publishers with the challenges of data quality and customer insight.

We spoke to their Managing Director, Nick Andrews, who shared a little bit of wisdom gleaned from all those years' experience.

"We've learnt a lot over the years about the wonderful world of database marketing, and how things can sometimes go a little wrong if the right tools and processes aren't in place. You'd be amazed at what gets through internal quality checks: some of it embarrassing, some of it downright cringeworthy.

As we reflect on ten years helping publishers avoid making mistakes, here are 10 ways to do database marketing badly (and how to avoid them)...

1. Call your customer "Ms Ass"

Or "Ms Ass Librarian" to be precise. Yes, this really happened. Somehow the job title of "Ass Librarian" ended up in a customer's first/last name fields, leading to a very unfortunate address label. Some basic checking and clean-up could have avoided this particular mistake.

Yes. Really.

2. Get their name (and gender) wrong

Unfortunately, overly vigorous data cleansing can also be a problem in its own right. Our Communications Director Jillian (female) regularly receives post addressed to "Julian" (male), presumably due to a software rule deciding that her real name must be a typo, and unhelpfully "correcting" it. Moral of the story: do clean your data, but try not to make it worse.

3. Try to sell something they've already bought 

With the complex world of package and consortia deals, this probably happens to unfortunate sales staff way more that it should. You send prospects a tempting deal... only to discover they've already bought the product in question. Properly getting to grips with your sales data isn't always easy, but it is the only sure way to avoid this type of embarrassment.

4. Try to sell something they've absolutely no interest in

Another awkward sales scenario: alienating your (potential) customers by trying to sell them products which don't match their interests. The "hey, let's just include everyone!" mailshot is a great way to do this. And the "hey, let's get our data together and do some proper segmentation!" project is a great way to avoid it.

5. Don't respect opt-outs

Ah yes. There is perhaps no greater way to turn a potential customer into an angry ball of rage, than to keep marketing to them after they've opted out. Companies don't do this intentionally of course, but plenty do it by mistake - often when opt-out requests aren't properly consolidated across different customer databases behind the scenes.

6. Don't communicate with opt-INs

Not respecting opt-outs definitely annoys customers, but so does neglecting to communicate with customers who are interested. If John Smith has taken the trouble to tick the box and opt in to your news and offers, you’d better send him some. Asking customers to opt in sets the expectation you'll have something useful and interesting to send their way.

7. Send far too much email

Many people are perfectly happy to receive relevant promotional messages from time to time, but nobody wants to feel bombarded on a daily basis. This can often happen if different departments or divisions are all marketing to the same pool of contacts, without coordinating their efforts to keep it to a reasonable level. A company-wide comms strategy should help solve that.

8. Get your facts wrong

It can make for a really compelling message to merge customer-specific details into your marketing emails, for example: "Your recent high/low usage of product X suggests you're really loving/hating it!!" But of course that's only impressive if the key facts are correct (and it makes a bad impression if they're not). Be sure of the quality and accuracy of your underlying data before trying this type of campaign.

9. Send marketing to the deceased

At its worst this mistake can be very upsetting for relatives of the deceased. There are services like Mortascreen out there to help remove deceased contacts up-front. But even without that level of checking in place, the most important thing is to make absolutely sure that any notice that a contact has died (often sent via email to customer services by a relative) is acted on promptly to ensure no further marketing is sent ever again.

10. Assume everybody has one unique email address

It's easier for databases to assume that one email address equals one person, but in reality many of us will have multiple emails (for home, work, etc.) and some share a single email address ('family_robinson...' etc.) It can be annoying for customers to receive the same message more than once, so it's good practice to get to grips with multiple emails and organize your comms accordingly.


But let's not feel too disheartened - it's true that database marketing can go wrong, but getting it right isn't rocket science. It's just a question of giving proper attention to data quality, establishing some form of single customer view, and ensuring you have a clear company-wide comms strategy. With those pieces in place, database marketing can be hugely effective.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. I have some cake to eat. Happy birthday DataSalon!"

Nick Andrews is MD of DataSalon who celebrate their 10th birthday this summer. Watch this video to find out more about them.