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If there is one common thread that runs through every aspect of direct marketing, from call centres to e-commerce, and direct mail, then it's addresses. As technology makes it easier for businesses to operate across borders, efficient management of a global database of addresses is becoming essential for many firms.

While correct addressing is one of the most important aspects in successful DM, it is also one of the most challenging - especially overseas, where simple address data is not available. On a basic level, address management problems fall into four categories: capturing data accurately, using the correct address format for each country, keeping each address up-to-date and managing sophisticated software packages.

A key issue in global address management is that while a handful of countries such as the UK, Netherlands, US and Australia have detailed and granular post-office-address files or equivalents, many countries, including several in Europe, do not.

Stefan Elliott, business development director for international marketing services at Experian, identifies a clear difference between availability of postal data in northern and southern Europe, with a much greater level of availability in the north. "We source data from a variety of providers, such as local authorities or third-party suppliers (across Europe)," says Elliott. "But in Spain, we have people that call town halls to confirm data."

Spain and southern Europe are not the only problem areas. According to Terry Hiles, managing director at address management company Capscan, the former Eastern Bloc countries can be particularly challenging, with references to entire streets and towns, formerly named after Soviet heroes, changing their names.

There are problems closer to home, too. "The Welsh have a letter W with a circumflex, which not one keyboard has," says Phil Good, managing director of address management specialists Hopewiser. "The people managing those addresses are mostly UK companies, which store an anglicised version of that address, which annoys the Welsh. But is it really economically viable to write a programme that deals with relatively few people?"

Add to this, the hundreds of ways of writing an address around the world - hundreds of languages, variants and character sets, millions of people moving house, dying and getting married and the intricacies of international law - and there are a lot of considerations to squeeze into a management solution. Brands that get it wrong could see a lot of mail missing its target or going in the bin. But by getting it right, they could save time and money by running effective campaigns, where borders are no barrier.

Software solutions

Thankfully, innovations in technology have made international address databases easier to manage. Most software companies now offer access to all their country data sets in a single programme or interface, although, as Good points out, there is still no single solution to cope on a truly worldwide basis. "Most of the companies that I'm aware of can supply different keyboard or file structures. A single global solution doesn't exist because of the sheer volume of characters and character sets you have to handle," he says.

Still, the programmes that are leading the market today can offer surprising levels of logic and intelligence in dealing with the nuances of international addressing. Tools such as Global Address Qudox software connects users who are inputting addresses into a website or software application to a constantly updated remote server, ensuring addresses are correct at the point of entry. Global Address products can, alongside other solutions in the market, match incomplete or fuzzy data at this stage. "The biggest challenge is collecting accurate data, which is often inputted by non-native language speakers, so spelling is an issue, as well as address formats as they change from country to country," says Martin Turvey, chief operating officer of Global Address.

Even the most confusing address data can now be sorted into appropriate fields, without containing specific country details - as long as the data contains information which is appropriate to a certain country. Ensuring that all segments of an address are in the correct field is a crucial step before data can be cleaned.

"It requires complex algorithms to deal with different countries, and you have to build in a different rule base for each one," says Ed Wrazen, vice president, marketing international at Harte-Hanks Trillium Software.

"You need to identify whether an address is French or German and apply a set of rules to standardise it before you can check it."

Once marketers reach the checking stage, and there is a standard template for storing each country's addresses and the data is available (see box above), then validating and deduping, using the software, should be straightforward.

Availability of accurate international data is one of the biggest problems in this area, as many countries do not have complete address data available from postal authorities.

"You have to use what you can," says Hiles. "In cases where you have identified countries as a particularly important market - and many are not sophisticated in terms of DM activity, so there's a cost implication - the path we find most advantageous is to take a local partner." Many companies go down this path, as well as buying data from utilities companies, governmental organisations, local clubs and societies, where postal data is unavailable.

Return on investment

As a last step, extra information can be appended and the addresses matched against different databases: goneaway information, mortality and exeption files, geo-demographic codes and international fraud and criminal files can all be used.

But how much does all this computing power cost to the end-user? Well, thanks to the internet, new and less expensive solutions are available for global addressing depending, of course, on the country data required.

International pay-per-click addressing solutions can start from £300 for a batch, while in-house and managed solutions can cost several thousands of pounds, depending on the size, country data and level of detail required.

But whatever the cost, practitioners argue that the payoff is worth it.

"We work on the basis that you'll get a six-fold return on investment from using these tools," says Sam Taverner, business development leader at Acxiom.

There is now no excuse for a business not to manage its international data. "There are bureau services at the high-end, but there are more affordable online systems, where it's returned to you cleaned and screened and enhanced in a matter of hours," according to Stefan Elliott, business development director for Experian's international marketing services.

But whatever the costs, the business impact of incorrect addressing, both in terms of cost and customer perception means that in an increasingly globalised world, managing international addresses can only become even more important for direct marketers.

NEED TO KNOW - Global alternatives to PAF

For many direct marketers looking for international add-resses, their first port of call might be the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the postal organisation of the United Nations, which is based in Switzerland and can provide postal data for its 190 member countries. The UPU also stores address formats for all member countries.

But for individual country solutions, national postal pro-viders can provide accurate enough address data in only a handful of countries worldwide, including the UK, US, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and several north European countries.

Elsewhere in the world, data is available from data providers, and address management companies will often partner with local businesses and government organisations to ensure their data is accurate. At this level, verifying addresses comes down to people on the ground or in call centres verifying details, which can be expensive.

"The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe are the easiest," says Terry Hiles, managing director of Capscan. "After that you move on an ever-decreasing scale until Africa, where you might just have a list of the main cities."

Trying to increase accuracy levels is vital for address-management companies and data suppliers. Rebecca Clayton, director of marketing at QAS, says that granularity and detail is crucial: "We only want to provide data that is good enough and if we are working in a country where the file isn't good enough, then we don't offer it."

Another crucial consideration for marketers is the cost of international address data. Interestingly, UK addresses are among the most expensive available. This is because the Postcode Address File (PAF) is licensed on a per-user basis. However, the most expensive posal data to license is from Argentina.

Sources: Capscan, QAS

CASE STUDY - MICROSOFT X-BOX

Brief: To ensure accurate data-capture in call centres

Target audience: Call centre agents in the UK and Netherlands

Supplier: Global Address

Following the launch of the Xbox games system in North America, Microsoft planned to sell the console in 15 European countries, plus Turkey. To do this, it needed to prepare its call centres for pre- and post-sales activity and tech-nical support.

Microsoft has call centres in the UK and Netherlands, and although its call-centre operators are bilingual, they have to understand and input the different address formats for

the 16 target countries. If an address was wrongly entered, Microsoft's customer service support application rejected it and call-centre operators had to reformat it.

Microsoft wanted to reduce the confusion of agents in its call centres, increase customer satisfaction and reduce the number of returned shipments with wrong addresses.

Microsoft Xbox's support-management team employed Global Address to help it resolve its address management issues.

Global Address worked with Microsoft to integrate its software with Microsoft's customer service support system. The new system meant that agents could generate an accurate postal address in the correct format for each of the 16 countries from no more than eight key strokes and access a complete, fully formatted address from incorrect and partial data.

"Every order that Microsoft takes is validated against our system. If you have one or two call centres around Europe, often you have non-native speakers and here all you have to do is provide a simple piece of information and it will look it up," says Martin Turvey, chief operating officer of Global Address. "A lot of freight companies are now surcharging companies if they can't deliver items. So there are knock-on effects to a poor address."