Directory company Yellow has selected US interactive marketing company Acxiom to boost its telemarketing data services.
Yellow owns and operates the Yellow and White pages after buying them from Telecom in March 2007 for $2.24 billion.
From March, Acxiom will provide "consumer telephone append" and name and address verification services based on Yellow’s White Pages directory. Graham Sergent, country manager for Acxiom New Zealand, says append services involve adding a telephone number to existing database records that do not otherwise have them and verifying the accuracy of numbers already appended.
"The information is typically used for customer retention purposes," he says.
It can also be used to bring different databases held by an organisation together to create a single view of the customer.
Yellow and Acxiom’s customers will also be provided with telemarketing prospect data from ConsumerBase, Acxiom’s multi-sourced consumer prospect database.
According to material on Acxiom's Australian website the New Zealand ConsumerBase product is a national, multi-sourced consumer database designed to help marketers accurately target the right sales prospects. It contains over 1.4 million personal records which can be segmented by home owner, age, income, sex, marital status, region, town, postcode and census meshblock.
The data can also be "flagged with telephone number available".
According to Acxiom, the information in ConsumerBase is privacy-compliant and screened against the latest version of the New Zealand Marketing Association file to ensure removal of the latest direct marketing suppressions, people who have requested not to receive direct marketing calls, and deceased records.
Sergent says clients can profile their own database against ConsumerBase to provide qualified targets.
“Yellow’s greatest asset is its data," says Yellow digital media director Blair Glubb. "By partnering with Acxiom we’ll be able to effectively leverage our data asset whilst still focusing on our core print, online and mobile services."