Bulletins

We produce a series of Forth Bulletins to help our clients meet their communication objectives. Click on the title of any to download a PDF of the bulletin.

Added 3 February 2010: FSA Mailing: Contracting In/Out of the State Second Pension: Usually a very straightforward mailing (letter plus FSA fact sheet), Forth are adopting a much more innovative approach, one which should hopefully reduce the volume of future mailings and which will save time, resource and money for the pension provider.

Added 4 February 2010: Financial Services: A simple guide to the VAT rules: It is important for businesses involved in Life & Pensions or in banking to be fully versed in the HM Revenue & Customs rules for VAT on direct marketing material, as such businesses often can not recover all the VAT on their purchases. This guide summarises the HMRC VAT publications and presents the main points in an easy to read format.

Added 4 February 2010: Direct Mail: Ways to save money: There are lots of ways in which money could be saved whilst managing your direct mail campaigns and Forth has produced a list of ‘tips’ to help.

Added 4 February 2010: Email address append process: Enhance your client data by appending their email address: Together with our partners we are now able to offer an email address append service and the straightforward process is outlined in a simple process chart.

Added 4 February 2010: AGM and Annual Report mailing: At Forth we have considerable experience in communications, and can assist our clients navigate around the obstacles which often come hand in hand with these large campaigns. We specialise in legislative and statement mailings and already undertake a number of our clients’ AGM mailings.

Added 4 February 2010: Reviewing your statements and other regulatory mailing campaigns: As you know the financial services landscape is rapidly changing, recent worldwide events and initiatives such as Treating Customers Fairly will require you to constantly review whether your customer correspondence delivers clearly what is required. Forth can assist you with your research based investigations.

Added 4 February 2010: E-voting web application for AGM Mailings: We outline some options if you are thinking about introducing e-voting into your AGM mailing process.

Added 4 February 2010: Undelivered mail: Reducing the volume and simplifying the process: We are all under pressure to reduce the administration time and costs involved with large volume mailings. One significant way is efficient management of the returned mail process, and this bulletin shows how it can be achieved.

Added 4 February 2010: Telephone Number Append Process: Enhance your customer data: To stay in contact with your customers it is advisable to update telephone number information on a regular basis. Forth has a method of 'cleansing' bulk customer records, amending incorrect numbers and appending missing numbers. The process starts with a free data audit and will help ensure that you do not hold incorrect or invalid telephone numbers against your customer records.

Added 4 February 2010: Seminars Campaign Management: An end to end solution: Seminar selling is a tried and tested way of recruiting new customers and selling new products to existing customers. We highlight the opportunities for getting best value from your seminar campaigns.

Added 4 February 2010: Debt collecting agency services: Managing the process of effective debt collection is a process which is best left to the experts. Forth is one of the very few providers offering a complete service from data cleaning through to in-house production, mailing, gone away capturing and customer tracing.

Added 4 February 2010: Your customer statements: Routes to success: Regular policy statements can be a key element in the ongoing communication with your customers. At Forth we have 20 years experience in designing and managing statement projects. We have used this to produce the Statement Road Map to help you determine where your company stands in its statement development and highlight what the next steps to improving your statements might be.

Added 24 February 2010: Hotels Data – Free audit, data cleaning and enhancement.: If you’re marketing to existing customers, cleaning your data can reduce costs and improve response rates. Forth are happy to provide free data audits which identify deaths, gone away records and change-of-address where a new address can be provided. We can also tell you how many email address we could append to your customer data.

Added 21 April 2010: Making the most of your Tax Certificate (P60) Mailing: Financial services companies are required to issue to their clients, where appropriate, a mailing advising of the amount of income tax deducted at source from their annuity, bank accounts etc.

Added 21 April 2010: Online statements: An increasing number of life and pension companies are turning their attention to the savings and environmental benefits to be gained as a result of encouraging clients to opt to receive electronic statements in the future. As a result of this increasing interest we have prepared this short paper to demonstrate how the electronic statement process would work.

Added 21 April 2010: Address and Existence Verification Process (Treating Customers Fairly): Within the Financial Services sector the ‘treating customers fairly’ initiative has encouraged companies to look at ways in which they can trace customers for whom they no longer hold a current address.

Added 21 April 2010: Customer Impact Survey Research opt-out: The Customer Impact Scheme was launched in March 2006, with the objective of improving outcomes for customers of the UK’s life, pensions and investment industry. Part of the scheme is a regular annual survey of customer views. The Scheme is part of the Financial Services Industry’s attempt to improve customers’ experiences, and an attempt to be held accountable for its performance.

Added 21 April 2010: Sourcing Corporate lists: Over the last 18 months many of the hotels we have been speaking with have mentioned that whilst their leisure business has been holding up, their level of corporate business has reduced significantly and this has obviously hit certain hotels more than others. However there are now signs that the market is on the way up and many of the signals are that we are now in ‘recovery mode’.

Added 24 May 2010: Young Business Personality of the Month: Allister Reid, Forth’s Software Development Team Leader is honoured by Business Eye.

Added 24 May 2010: Are you being ‘green with your customer data?: Brian Nelson explains why quality data is vital to limiting waste and environmental damage.

Added 27 July 2010: Client Tracing Solution: Our client, a large UK Bank, had 1,000+ unclaimed investment bonds where the address they held on the customer database was no longer valid. In keeping with the spirit of Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) our client wanted to try and re-unite these customers with the proceeds of their bonds.

Added 26 August 2010: Environmental Issues: We look at some of the key environmental factors and elements affecting print and DM.