Better Data, Better ROI

Aren’t you always under pressure to improve sales and reduce costs? I think the answer is yes. I have consulted with many organizations in several different verticals. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the positive impact of excellent data. I have been able to dramatically improve the close rates of sales campaigns just with proper data cleansing and deduplication.

If you are doing direct mail with invalid addresses, sales campaigns filled with duplicates or email campaigns without proper suppressions, you are killing your ROI. These are all things and more I have seen. Marketers need help to reach their marketing goals. This requires strong reporting, excellent quality control and good process and procedure. Excellent data quality is the key. The following are some ideas that may help you. You can also reach out to me for help at www.CRM-Whiz.com.

Duplicates

Duplicates come in multiple forms like emails, mailing addresses or phone numbers. Deduplication can be challenging. See below for some guidelines.

Duplicate emails are the easiest to handle. After cleansing the emails just do and exact match to remove duplicates. It is also a good idea to check the domains. You want to be sure you don’t send hundreds of emails to one domain which may trigger domain blocking.

Duplicate addresses are more complex. How you handle this will vary if you are doing B2B or B2C. I recommend applying address standardization (CASS) and mover software (NCOA) first before removing the duplicates. You may want to contact 1 individual at an address. The difficulty here is what rules you will use to pick the one person you want to talk to. If you want to talk to multiple individuals at an address you will need to include the name. That introduces multiple issues like misspellings and nicknames. You should also QA the number of people you are going to contact at an address. You likely won’t want to contact dozens of people in one organization. Job titles may be a good way to select who you want to communicate with.

Duplicate phones introduce other issues if you are B2B. What if the number is a company phone number and several of your contacts are tied to this phone? You would need to integrate the name with all the name issues I noted above. Also, what do you do if one of the contacts ask not to be contacted. Do you flag everyone with that phone as DNC? That might flag dozens of people that may want to hear about your product or service. This is something you need to consider.

Suppressions

Once I was asked by a marketing leader “why do you do suppressions?”. It was an interesting question I had never been asked before. I replied, suppressions are used to conform to compliance issues, to avoid spamming and to put a positive face on the company. As an example, I received a mailing campaign recently with my name spelled 3 different ways on 3 letters. This is embarrassing to the organization and lowers the overall reputation as well.

During the execution of a marketing campaign, you should receive a waterfall report of suppressions showing a list of each suppression applied and the number of records affected. Below are several examples of suppressions that should be considered in your campaign.

1. Duplicates.
2. Invalid emails, phones, or addresses – The communication won’t be delivered anyway.
3. Recently contacted – the contact may be in other recent campaigns or to control spamming.
4. Do not contacts – Some recent laws could lead to fines.
5. Profanities – Very important if your data is coming from a web form.
6. Competitors – Its best not to tell them what you are doing.
7. Designated Nationals – Groups identified as terrorists or criminal organizations.
8. Bounces – Sending too many will lower your reputation and may lead to ISP blocking.
9. USPS rejects – The communication won’t be delivered anyway.

There are many more suppression possibilities, it will depend on what you are doing.


Validate Email Addresses

There is software that will validate the email domain and provide a deliverability score. Depending on the score you can decide how much risk you are willing to take reaching down to the lower levels which may increase bounces. You want to avoid bounces and spamming as much as possible. That can lead to being blocked by the ISP and/or the domain.

It’s possible to use some simple code to check for the invalid formatting of emails. If an email fails this check the email needs to be suppressed or repaired.

Validate Phone

The phone number is made up of 3 parts. The NPA or area code in positions 1 to 3, the NXX or the exchange in positions 4 to 6 and the XXXX in positions 7 to 10. Number portability limits what we can do with the phone numbers today. It is even hard to validate the NPA and NXX.

You should remove fictitious phone numbers like NXX “555”. You will see this used in movies. There are a few more fictitious phones, it gets a little complicated and too much detail for now.

You may need to suppress against the do not call registry. The do not call stipulations don’t cover calls from political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors, or individuals where you have an existing business relationship. It mostly applies to B2C but can apply to B2B if you are contacting micro businesses.

Validate Mailing Addresses

You save significant money if you use postal presort, but you need to follow the rules set out by the USPS. If you don’t follow their rules but attempt to get postal discounts you can end up with significant fines. Primarily they want you to apply address standardization (CASS) and national change of address (NCOA – movers). This is done so the USPS can save money and pass those savings on to you.

It will also allow you to remove records that won’t be delivered anyway. It is a good idea to track returned mail as well. Reducing contacts from returned mail can save you significant money.

Summary

This isn’t a complete list of data issues you will need to address. There are several others like bad names, bad titles, incorrect demographic, or firmographic data to name a few. Perfection isn’t possible but with proper standards, procedures and QA you can make significant improvements. The results from good data will drive improved engagement and higher sales.

Data cleansing is part of what I do at CRM Whiz. If you need help or assistance, please reach out to me. If the article was helpful, a like is appreciated.


Regards,

Scott Matson
Scott.Matson@CRM-Whiz.com
Connect with me on linked in

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