“We’re really good at everything that’s special about the letter shop,” says Jörg Hennig, CEO of Trebbau, with a hint of pride. An example he gives is a customer who looks at a blouse in the online shop several times, but still hesitates. But receiving a surprise postcard from the supplier may persuade this customer to make the purchase.

However, the Cologne-based company is not just specialized in personalized mailings that require special production skills, they are also experts in data processing and management, in both online and offline dialogue marketing. Address marketing: another strong pillar of the company

Secure regular customers with up-to-date addresses

If you don’t want mailings to fall flat, you’ll find that up-to-date addresses are often the icing on the cake. Time frequently comes into play. This is why Trebbau relies on address maintenance online and working closely with Swiss Post for its Swiss customers. Trebbau usually receives the address comparison results plus acceptance of the offer from the client in the space of a few hours, which saves them several working days compared to before.

Trebbau’s customers are happy to pay a bit extra to ensure their messages reach the right end customers and achieve the desired impact. Michael Eicks, Customer Support Officer for DataProcessing with Trebbau, knows from years of experience: “It’s always cheaper to pay for the move than to throw the mailing in the bin.” Maintaining and reactivating regular customers is always cheaper than acquiring new ones.

Operating sustainably

Even though the price of paper is higher today, customers are guided by more than just economic reasons. According to CEO Jörg Hennig, the desire to operate sustainably is becoming increasingly important. The postage and transporting that undeliverable items require, as well as paper waste, can be avoided with up-to-date addresses. This is why Trebbau now offers its customers address maintenance as a standard service.

Transparency for customers

Prior to delivery, Trebbau first performs deduplication in house with its own algorithm for its customers. Trebbau then has the addresses updated with address maintenance online, and always without the duplicates option. Personal and third-party addresses are compared separately. By doing this, Trebbau can show its customers the differences between addresses, and the customer can decide to just have the updated personal addresses if they so choose. Trebbau then delivers the address maintenance offer, completely unedited, to its customer. This transparency is very important to Michael Eicks: “The name Swiss Post Ltd inspires trust and is a byword for quality, which is why we do not filter anything. Having the costs displayed in Swiss francs may also be convenient for the customer.”

If the customer accepts the offer, Trebbau performs an additional deduplication procedure using the updated addresses. Trebbau uses its own policy to prepare the shipment file. In the case of movers’ addresses, the new address replaces the old one. Addresses with the status “Deceased/company dissolved” and “New address unknown” are deleted from the file. This ensures mailings with up-to-date addresses successfully reach the end customer. Finally, Trebbau delivers the file to the customer so that they can enter the corrections and information on the individual addresses in the database, and update these.

A well-received service that was easy to use

It turned out to be straightforward to put the service into operation, and didn’t take that much time. Only the policy required had to be created, which was not rocket science. Trebbau would rate its satisfaction with the address maintenance online service as an 8 out of 10. Michael Eicks adds: “There aren’t many improvements needed.” There has hardly been any customer feedback either, or, to put it another way: no news is good news. On the contrary, the high rate of usage amongst Trebbau’s customers makes one thing clear: the service is good!

More information on address maintenance products