Online Vinyl Firm Refuses to be Floored by Dirty Data

Aug. 16, 2011 - PRLog -- An online flooring company specialising in vibrant designs is praising ‘the power of the postcode’ for its sustained 30% growth.

Established in 1994 in a small office in Battersea, harveymaria® designs and sells lively vinyl flooring to businesses and consumers. The company’s website uses NetSuite ecommerce software, with rapid address look-up from Postcode Anywhere, to keep track of customers and guarantee contact data accuracy.

Mark Findlay, founder and co-managing director of harveymaria®, said: “Back in 1994 floors were neglected spaces - the poor relations of the interiors world. But we saw them as a great design opportunity. We wanted to wave goodbye to dull, boring and mundane flooring and replace it with something funky, fun and fresh.

“We’ve seen the demise of traditional flooring shops battling against increasing overheads and the downturn in consumer spending. In this context, how we respond to website leads isn’t simply a case of tweaking sales conversions, it’s the difference between business success and failure. This is where postcode look-up comes in. It’s not a new concept, but we consider it as key to our success and 30% growth.

“It’s vital to get our free samples to people - if we can’t get a sample to them, I don’t think they’d to trust us to lay their floor! We send out 200 items per week - over 10,000 every year. It seems hard to go back to the time before we used it: now, we have only two failed deliveries per annum, negligible to figures before using postcode look-up.

“We’ve moved on a bit since the early days. We began in the back bedroom of a house in Battersea. Our first attempts were simply colour photocopies of designs stuck to the floor and lacquered to make them hardwearing. However, friends and family loved them and requests came flooding in.”

Now, the business boasts a Cath Kidston range and has made bespoke commissions for Hamleys Toy Store, The Royal Geographical Society, and the Millennium Bridge. The bridge’s money-themed floor, commissioned by MasterCard, was “widely recognised as a sterling achievement,” according to the company.

Mark added: “It’s amazing how much you can tell about your marketing activity by analysing postcodes – we built up our own customer profiles. We are still only scratching the surface of what we could do with our captured data. We could easily use it for proactive marketing activities like direct mailing. It’s really helped tailor our customer relationship management (CRM) software with up-to-date, accurate data.”

Postcode Anywhere’s sales and marketing director Phil Rothwell said: “It’s critical to make every customer’s experience easy and hassle-free across your website - from sign-up, through purchase, right through to delivery. Postcode look-up is a simple but powerful tool to make your business more effective. It makes the essential job of collecting an address 80% faster, but perhaps more importantly, guides customers into giving you perfect address details every time. Postal workers have no problem delivering your products and mailings, and you don’t let the simple address-box typo drive any customers away.”

For more information about harveymaria®, please visit the website at www.harveymaria.co.uk. All harveymaria® floors are manufactured to ISO: 9001 quality standards and guaranteed for domestic and commercial usage for up to 15 years.

To find out more about Postcode Anywhere’s range of services for keeping contact data clean and improving the customer journey, visit www.postcodeanywhere.com.

ENDS

Media contact for Postcode Anywhere
Jim Williams – PR Manager
jim@postcodeanywhere.com
+44 (0) 1905 888 562

Press centre at: http://www.postcodeanywhere.com/press
Press Pack download: http://www.postcodeanywhere.com/assets/PDFs/press-pack-20...

Notes for editors

About Postcode Anywhere

Postcode Anywhere supplies software and services which improve the day-to-day operations of over 8,000 organisations worldwide. Best known as a provider of address auto-fill and verification software, the company offers a range of data-driven services, including route planning, customer profiling and bank account validation. It is now the fastest-growing reseller of Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF®) and the market leader for online address auto-fill. A multi-award-winning organisation, it has also appeared in Deloitte’s European fast-growth technology company list for three years running. For more information about Postcode Anywhere, please visit www.postcodeanywhere.com.

Recent Awards and Recognition for Postcode Anywhere

•   Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2008/9, 2009/10 & 2010/11
•   Red Herring Top 100 Europe - 2010
•   Best Small IT Supplier of the Year - UK IT Industry Awards (finalist) – 2009
•   Dell Small Business Excellence Award (UK finalist) – 2009
•   Small-Medium Sized Business of the Year (regional finalist) - National Business Awards 2009
•   Orange Best Use of Technology (Midlands) - 2008 National Business Awards
•   Growth Business of the Year - Chamber Awards 2008
•   Small Business of the Year - Chamber Awards 2008
•   Customer Service Team of the Year (finalist) - National Customer Services Awards 2008

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Postcode Anywhere is a UK-based company best known for its market-leading “what’s your postcode” technology. Its services include route optimisation, international addressing, data cleansing, business information services and lifestyle profiling.