Clean, Update and Complete
Clean and Update Your Customer Data to Improve Quality
Cleaning, updating and completing the data records in your customer database / CRM or Customer Data Platform will prevent it from getting stale and inaccurate, thereby reducing costs from wasted campaigns and increasing your opportunity to reach the most customers.
Cleaning refers primarily to address hygiene using traditional methods such as National Change of Address (NCOA) and Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) which improves the match rate and finds additional movers. In addition, there are other advanced hygiene processes that can refresh older data since NCOA processing only goes back a maximum of forty-eight months.
In addition to postal addresses, e-mail addresses are constantly going stale, so we recommend performing eCOA as well to update old email addresses to current active addresses.
A Data Health Assessment Report, tests your customer/CRM name and address data to determine how your data quality compares with other companies and determine which hygiene processes make economic sense. Here is an example of the key Data Health Assessment results:
In this example, duplicates, undeliverable addresses and vacate addresses are above the industry norm and should be fixed.
Another data quality service we recommend is to append a “deceased” flag which will indicate which specific individuals match against a trailing six-year database of deceased individuals. This is especially important if your customers tend to be older. For example, one of our hearing aid clients found that their database, which they were mailing to quarterly, contained 12% deceased individuals. Removing these records saved thousands of dollars and improved branding and backlash from living relatives.
Complete Your Data
Every database has missing data. The good news is that it is possible to fill in many of the gaps. For example, if you have name and address it is possible to append email and phone. If you have just email (and maybe part of the name) you can perform Reverse Email Append (REA) to get the full name and address. Similarly, if you have just phone (and perhaps part of the name), you can append the full name and address.
It is even possible to append full name and address if the only information you have is name and ZIP Code. This process includes an indicator of the predicted certainty of the appended data.
Note that privacy best practices, including the latest DMA Guidelines for Ethical Best Practices (published in 2017 and in effect as of July 2018) require providing any customers whose records are appended with an email address to have a chance to opt-out of receiving emails from you. Our standard practice related to Email Appends is to deploy a “permission pass” email to each recipient giving them the opportunity to opt-out.
How to Clean, Update or Complete Your Data
Most of the processes mentioned above are available through one of the following systems:
- Data Enhancement via Self-Service User Interface – perform email append, phone append (land lines only, pre-scrubbed against Do Not Call lists, NCOA, PCOA and deceased flag append.
- Batch Enhancement via FTP – can perform just about any hygiene process on a schedule.
- Real-time Data Enhancement via Data Pipe / API – can perform most hygiene processes in real time,
Other processes may require special handling (e.g., appending full name and address to name and ZIP Code).