Businesses rely on their database cleansing to steer the direction of many things like where to invest the most money, which features to add or cut from a product, what marketing programs yield the highest returns, etc. As a business owner, it is paramount that you make these decisions based on relevant information. When an entrepreneur has bad data being fed into their system, it can be extremely detrimental to their growth as they won't have access to valuable and accurate knowledge that they need to make smart choices. Eric Niebergall, Sr. Sales Engineer, explains how businesses can protect themselves against bad data.
How to define data cleansing and what are the stages of the data cleansing?
Data cleansing ensures that data remains accurate, complete, and free from duplicate records. Data cleansing consists of data quality management, enrichment, and identification of duplicates.
Hygiene
Data hygiene is a broad term covering several things, including direct mail (name and physical address), email, and phone number.
Direct Mail
Did you know that most companies waste money sending direct mailings because the addresses are not standardized1? Companies investing in direct mail need to ensure their address book is up-to-date with all of the changes in the address every year. This can lead to the company spending such a large sum of money on undeliverable mail without trying to do something about it.
Email hygiene is important because Hotmail and other reputable mail providers use it to determine how often an IP should be blocked or placed under some blacklist so that they can avoid receiving malicious messages or emails that harm their reputation! For some email providers, a “ping” process lets you know if an email address is different from what it was in the database. If so, the email provider sends a message to both suspicious and hard bounce addresses, alerting them of this change. In addition to these messages being sent out by the mailbox owners themselves, Microsoft's Outlook also sends out its notifications to the database owner when their emails are somewhere aside from their inbox or spam folder. At this point, companies can turn to their provider to update email addresses that have been identified as having suspicious activity.
Augmenting/Enhancing
Data augmentation is best used to fill in missing pieces of incomplete records. For example, suppose a customer record is missing a phone number or email address. In that case, the Data Axle system provides data about the format and location of these “missing” fields so that the information can be appended manually to create a complete record. If a record is missing more complex, non-traditional fields (a physical address, for example), then reverse append could be applied to an existing area (like email) to derive that information and add it as part of the total record.
What are the biggest benefits of regular data cleansing?
Whether your goal is to attract new customers or keep old ones, having access to detailed and actionable data can be the difference between a successful campaign and one that fails.
More effective campaigns and higher conversion rates
We found a recent Forrester and Data Axle study where the researchers found that when using accurate, actionable data to support marketing campaigns, marketing organizations saw an estimated yearly increase of $104 million in marketing-driven revenue for the average enterprise of 500+ employees. In the same study, respondents reported achieving more than double the conversion rates with campaigns powered by high-quality data compared to campaigns run on unverified or poor-quality data.
Better personalization
Personalizing an email subject line is a great way to connect with consumers, but this only happens when marketers utilize relevant data to craft the line. Data Axle, an Email Marketing and CRM platform provider, report that personal emails are opened more frequently than emails without personal touches. The report found that personalized subject lines rose open rates by 50%, CTOs increased by 58%, and click-through rates shot up by 70%. This indicates how important it is for brands to utilize demonstrable information to create a personalized greeting that will make subscribers want to open the message.
How often should data be cleansed?
Data cleansing is crucial to keep customers relevant and up-to-date. Data cleaning should be done every quarter. However, suppose you do not have the internal resources necessary to cleanse your customer data in real-time. In that case, you can wash it quarterly or semi-annually.
For more guidance on choosing a database cleaning service partner to fulfill your needs, use our consultation or get in touch for more information on how we cleanse data and generate leads.
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