As the dominant purchase channel, the internet is causing an increase in hygiene issues. Instead of trained data entry specialists, consumers enter their information directly. The result is a higher incidence of foul language, typos and good data in the wrong places. Poor hygiene can lead to inferior duplicate elimination, suboptimal data aggregation and a decrease in campaign performance. In addition, new methods of marketing and changes in lifestyle require marketers to go beyond hygiene tools that just enable them to qualify for postal discounts. Marketers need to expand their tool set to deal with the modern data issues of today.
Hygiene that Addresses Specific B to B Needs
Information like business title, care of name and routing designations, often get mixed across multiple address lines rendering many undeliverable if not handled properly.
- Analyze the “four line address block” as a Whole in order to distinguish between address elements vs. name and title type information critical for matching logic used by other processes such as NCOA.
- Standardize Business Titles and Company Names After title and company name have been properly identified, the potential permutations of each require special hygiene processes for a more professional look, better data aggregation, segmentation, selection and analysis. For example, “Chf. Exec. Off.”, “CEO”, “Chief Executive Officer” are all the same title but standardization is needed to transform them into a common name.
The ability to identify title and company within address lines and standardize them is important for those wanting to use them for suppression or selection as well as those wishing to limit the contacts targeted per site.
Growing and Maintaining your Email Contacts
Emails are being sent with greater frequency as they remain one of the lowest priced media option for direct communication as well as a favorite of the “green movement”. Maintaining and growing an email list is an on-going consideration as addresses change more frequently than land address and coverage of the buyer file is less than 100%.
- Reduce undeliverable email list growth with ECOA Send your undeliverable email addresses for email change of address processing to find their latest address. Once identified, target with a permission request and re-engage.
- Rehabilitate Email Addresses Regular cleansing of the email address list itself is needed to reduce undeliverable records by ensuring valid domains and proper structure.
- Expedite Email Database Growth with Appends Using name and land address, you can match your buyers and inquirers to email compiler data sources to find the corresponding email address on approximately 25% of records. Use a “two-pass” approach to leverage more than one provider and optimize coverage
- Stagger the Addition of New Emails into your Deployment Tool. Not all ESPs will accept emails obtained thru append. Some will “flag” a file when the growth rate is beyond the norm. Understand any limitations that might exist prior to append and either stagger the addition or identify an alternative provider who will allow this form of growth.
Telephone Numbers are Not just for Phone Calls Anymore…
Telephone companies now allow customers to take their telephone number with them as they move from provider to provider. Portable phone numbers equate to a greater value for each one captured or appended due to the longer life cycle.
- Append Telephone numbers by matching name and address or email address to one of many available compliers as a quick way to grow your contact list
- Confirm the accuracy of existing telephone numbers on your file to save marketing dollars
- Know the “type” of telephone number stored on your file. To save money, many are eliminating their land line in favor of their mobile phone. According to the FCC, “it is unlawful for any person to make any call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with express prior consent) using any automatic telephone dialing system or any artificial or prerecorded voice message to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, mobile telephone service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call.” Therefore, it is important that marketers append phone type, such as landline, mobile, voice-over-IP phone (VoIP), beeper/pager, in order to ensure compliance as well as send the appropriate campaign to the right device.
The Latest Hygiene for Modern Times
Data is the key to marketing strategies. Keeping it clean, up-to-date and filling in the missing pieces is critical to success. New tools are now available to address our modern concerns. Explore their impact and make every marketing dollar count.
