Contact data is like the foundation of a house. Once a business is built on it, few direct marketers ever think about it again since they assume it is solid. Unfortunately, we marketers have a long history of taking name, postal address, email address and phone number data quality for granted, despite its vital importance to our business.
The fact is all contact data will deteriorate over time and can eventually contain enough flaws to put the whole marketing structure in jeopardy.
- Poor address data means more postage cost on some or all of your mailings,
- Wasted marketing dollars and lost sales mount up because mailings aren’t getting delivered to the target customer,
- Circulation and response numbers are skewed by list duplicates,
- Analytics are flawed because customers and their transactions are not accurately identified and their interactions with the company aren’t fully understood.
What’s in YOUR Data?
Here are some uncomfortable facts about customer contact data collection:
- If data is collected at point of sale retail locations, 10% - 25% will contain serious errors – even if the customer is asked to verify it before entry!
- Data collected by call centers – especially if third party outsourced – will have 5%-10% data defects.
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The USPS estimates that about 15% of the population of the
- The USPS will only forward first class mail unless the mailer includes a specific postal endorsement. The USPS estimates that 6.4% of all advertising standard class mail is thrown away every year.
- In multi-channel environments, you may capture the same customer two or three times – each time with slightly different information. If the data isn’t examined, reconciled and combined properly, you could be adding to your duplicates at the rate of 10% - or more - a year.
- Prospect lists – even from the best brokers – are by their nature not very clean. You can expect a 20%-30% bad data rate from any prospect list.
- The combination of errors, unknown movers, duplicates and incomplete data can deteriorate your list as much as 25% per year!
Death and taxes …and Data Errors
Far too often direct marketers think that they can deal with data quality problems as discrete, periodic events. The logic in this approach is flawed because the data doesn’t “stand still” and will never be perfect.
Turning your list over to a service bureau 4 times a year for cleansing is, of course, better than doing nothing, but doesn’t help you to make good decisions campaign by campaign.
Likewise, letting your vendor do your cleansing is convenient – print vendors will do standardization and address updates at the time of mailing and ISPs will filter out bad and opt-out emails before a campaign goes out – but do you know who is getting changed/dropped? How does that affect your carefully made models and selections?
To better understand your list data quality and pinpoint potential issues for resolution, you should be performing frequent data cleansing and review processes.
Recommended best practices include:
- Standardize and format data consistently form all sources.
- Capture valuable data information from address, phone and e-mail hygiene processes:
- Update data on every customer contact and follow best practices suggested by the USPS and other industry organizations.
- Allow customers to communicate updates and preferences – and retain the information.
- Develop matching criteria that fits your business need based on the available data.
- Profile your customer data regularly to look for potential problems and build meaningful reports that track data status over time.
Most industry experts recommend having a data quality strategy to consistently implement these best practices. Perhaps most importantly, an in-house data quality steward is required to act as a “general contractor”, overseeing all the processes and vendors involved.
I won’t lie – this approach involves a commitment from business, and may involve searching for and/or modifying commercially available data hygiene software—which can mean significant IT time. If you currently are working with a data hygiene software provider, it will also involve working with them to customize their services to meet your needs.
One of the worst things a marketer can do is assume everything is all right because ”we are working with Big Service Bureau X” or “the printer takes care of all that”. When it comes to such a vital company asset, ignorance is not bliss.
The longer you wait to apply a contact data quality strategy, the less stable your business foundation may be.
Sharon Neuenfeldt, Chief Consultant at CIQ Consulting, provides independent customer information consulting to companies needing help with name, address, phone and email address quality. She can be reached at 952-201-3007 or sneuenfeldt@ciq-consulting.com.