Member Article

Spring clean your database... throughout the year

Organisation is only achieved when things in your life are tidy and maintained. Imagine an untidy car, an untidy house with all paper work and bills mixed in a draw, a mixture of children toys, money and house keys. Surely, before long things will get out of hand, bills will be overdue, things of value will get lost and you may end up having long conversation to the bank to order new bank cards. So, where does having a clean database come in and how does this benefit you?

Marketers understand the benefit of having clean and accurate data, data that is easily accessible and standardized to be used in successful marketing campaigns. With information firstly being captured incorrectly and entered with no order in a CRM system can prove costly when coming to use it. Questions will be asked “do the people still exist, are they still at the same address, how many times have they enquired and been added into the system?” A marketing campaign will just not work effectively if data isn’t clean and organised.

Direct mail campaigns, one of the most proven and successful ways to engage with your client base effectively, that is of course assuming the message will reach the targeted audience? Sending out thousands of pieces of direct mail to contacts without cleansing the data prior to a direct mail campaign, is a sure way to say good bye to any possible return on investment.

Data screening allows you to view the quality of your data but also highlight the areas where it needs to be improved. For a direct mail campaign to be effective, efforts need to be made to eliminate persons who are deceased or goneaway out of the database and ensure the addresses are standardised into a correct format. If this is not the case, your brand image is at stake by knowingly sending out mail to a party that is deceased, or paying the price for the mail to be return to you. By having a duplicate amount of records within the database will only mean the same piece of mail will be sent twice to the one person it was intended for, doubling your costs.

Email validation is an essential tool to ensure your companies servers are protected and you’re not known as a ‘spammer’. If to many hard bounces are recorded, large email platforms will refuse to deal with your data, leaving you to take a massive risk by sending the data out yourselves. By using a live address validation tool will accurately test the email mailboxes to give a view whether the email address is live or not. By doing so will save both time and money by protecting yourself and keeping your brand image intact.

Not only direct mail and email campaigns can benefit from data cleansing, imagine a call centre calling incorrect numbers and deadlines all day? Not only would this be a waste of time but it would also lead to complaints if the number was not registered to the intended party. Telephone validation allows all numbers to be validated live that ensures a higher contact rate, saves operator time, more effective calling campaigns, this increases return on investment.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Victoria Wilson .