Whether you call it data hygiene, data cleansing, database maintenance or some other term – marketers know the value of data lies in its ability to reach your core audience.
Bad data literally costs money, with companies losing 12% of revenue annually due to:
- incorrect strategic decisions
- loss of productivity
- marketing dollars lost
- reduced credibility
- loss of opportunities and revenue
When you have clean data, you can reach the customers or prospects you are trying to engage, make smarter decisions about segmentation and other tactics, avoid budget waste, and more. Data hygiene is a valuable tool in every marketer’s arsenal, so make sure you are paying attention to your database and maintaining it at a high level.
Managing Your Email Data
While paying attention to your whole database is important, email data hygiene is especially crucial and comes with its own unique set of challenges as well as special tools available for marketing.
There are a few simple tools out there that can help you to identify email addresses that are invalid, including:
For a small cost, you can use any of these systems to help identify invalid email addresses in your customer or prospect lists to remove them before pressing send. As you do this more regularly, your reputation will increase and so will the deliverability of your email sends.
For every dollar spent on email marketing, the return is an average of $44, making investments in your email addresses one of the best ways to increase revenue and improve ROI.
You can also delve further by replacing inaccurate or outdated email addresses with new data to help continue reaching those customers or prospects.
Cleaning Your Database
Data cleansing is the process of removing “bad” data by identifying inaccurate or missing information in your database and updating it for better performance.
When you send a direct mail campaign and receive envelopes that weren’t delivered or pick up the phone to call a customer who can’t be reached you are wasting valuable budget dollars and time. Simply by keeping up with data cleansing practices, you can overcome these limitations to increase response rates.
AccuData offers a variety of services to help you pinpoint and remove bad records from your database, including:
- Removing minors in your database
- Bankruptcy suppression
- Taking out those who have registered with the Do Not Call list or Do Not Mail list
- Removing deceased individuals
- Prison suppression
- And more
Additionally, as you need to refresh your data, services can help you by updating old contact information with new telephone numbers, postal data, email addresses and other important details.
If you need help with data hygiene to keep your company from losing money, contact AccuData’s experts today for help!