Data quality is for life – not just for Christmas

You might not think it, but it is possible for Christmas marketing campaigns to deliver fantastic response rates for marketers. The festive season provides the perfect opportunity for companies to rapidly expand their customer databases and obtain as much usable consumer data as possible. It’s also a good time to make the most of any data you already have. But it all hinges on contact data - because, unfortunately, a large proportion of your campaigns will not even reach the correct recipients. In most cases, poor data quality results in a lost opportunity, a lost sale and wasted marketing budget. 

It is common knowledge that data decays rapidly. Address data is prone to get out-of-date particularly quickly, with studies typically indicating consumer data degradation is around 15-20% and business data by 30-40% on average every year. If your database is a few years old, the majority of your data is likely to be outdated, and your direct marketing budget will be wasted. It is also important to remember to keep your records up to date from a GDPR and compliance point of view.  The scale of this problem can be accounted for by many factors: human error, changes of address and personal circumstance to name but a few.

But people don’t collectively wait until the day before you run your data cleanse before they all decide to move house.  It’s this fact that makes data quality maintenance a continuous task and not something that can be employed only once before a big campaign. In addition, data files are becoming considerably larger and more complex, as is the software managing them.

Yule is not just the time for chestnuts and mulled wine: it’s the time for a congested delivery network. The bad news is that no matter why your parcels don’t arrive, it’s your reputation that will take some kind of hit. Poorly-addressed deliveries cause one of the biggest headaches for postal workers at Christmas. It’s in any company’s interest to improve address data quality to reduce the chances of a slowdown at the sorting office.

The consequences of poor address data should not be underestimated. According to Fixing Failed Deliveries, incorrect delivery addresses cost online businesses around £200, 000 every year. A staggering 1 in twenty online orders never make it to the doormat first time because of an error in the address. This kind of situation, which has the potential to cause serious damage to a business, is exactly the sort of problem which can be so easily avoided with technology such as address capture and a routine data cleanse.

So, what can you do about it?

Removing latent, dormant and incorrect details can save you time and money when it comes to improving the effectiveness of your campaigns. Without this, your business is wasting time tracking fruitless prospects just because they appear in the sales database. Ultimately, the simple process of updating your mailing lists with regular data hygiene takes your marketing budget much further. Not to mention the distress and reputation damage you could cause by contacting bereaved family members. 

That’s why, in the run-up to Christmas we’re offering a completely free data health check. We compare your organisation’s customer and prospect records against our own data sources to reveal just how accurate and complete your business data is. Try it now, spread some Christmas cheer and see how many more people you could reach this year.