You’ve planned your campaign, selected your target audience and pulled together your mailing list. But how do you make sure you’re reaching the right people and their details are up to date? Steven Day, director of contact data management bureau UKChanges, explains how.

Spring clean your database

Why clean up your contacts database? If you need to ask, then the chances are that yours needs a tidy up. The simple answer is, customers and future prospects have an annoying habit of disappearing, and if they don’t tell you where they’re going, then your database may be quickly out of date.

Some people move and others pass away; plus addresses, phone numbers and communication channel preferences change. Rarely will people tell you: they're too busy.

The same is true in B2B. Company name changes, relocations and business failures all have an impact on the accuracy, currency and value of your customer and prospect contact information.

The result of failing to maintain or update your contact records is greater resource wastage, increased cost per acquisition and significant reductions in return on investment (ROI) – all of which undermine the benefits of direct communications at a time when the financial accountability of your marketing is paramount.

Start at the very beginning

You’ve applied some data intelligence, selected your channels and decided on your target, offer and timing. Now all you need to do is get the breathtaking creative out to the punters and wait for the sales to roll in. Right? Well, almost.

Unfortunately, contact data hygiene is often overlooked and undervalued for the role it plays in the success of good direct mail campaigns. So, make a small investment upfront, get your data in order and reap the rewards that improved accuracy delivers for this campaign and future direct mail communications.

Common data problems

Poorly maintained data can lead to a variety of different issues. Typically these will include some or all of the following:

Nomenclature

Getting people’s (and companies') names right, formatted consistently and free from ‘inappropriate’ additions is the most basic tenet of data accuracy.

Incorrect addresses

Whatever the cause, address errors reduce mail deliverability, create costs for returns mail handling and undermine the effectiveness of other data cleansing, management and analysis processes.

Duplicate records

Multiple efforts to communicate the same message to the same individual through the same (or different) communication channels is a waste of money and a sure-fire way to annoy recipients.

Goneaways

They've moved house or changed premises and they didn’t tell you. You’re wasting effort and budget sending messages to recipients who have moved on and you’re also annoying the new occupant.

Deceased individuals

Your customer or prospect has died and you’re still sending them mail, making phone calls or dropping them promotional emails. Chances of a positive outcome: zero. Chances of creating distress, upset and a negative brand image: very high.

Wrong numbers

BT makes roughly 50,000 changes to the OSIS database every day. So some, or many, of the telephone numbers you hold are likely to be out of date. In addition to dead lines, annoyed pick-ups and brand damage, repeatedly hearing “wrong number” can have a negative impact on agent morale and productivity which will increase costs and reduce response rates.

Invalid email addresses

Missing elements, incomplete email addresses, misspelt domains and other data issues will result in bounce-backs and increase the likelihood of earning a place on your audiences’ spam lists.

Legal pitfalls

Best practice demands you use the MPS file and Baby MPS file to suppress the details of people who do not want to receive your mailer. Legal obligations include screening phone numbers against the TPS or Corporate TPS; screening fax numbers against the FPS; and checking your choice of individuals’ numbers against in-house ‘do not contact’ lists.

Ceased trading

The company you were targeting has gone out of business and, while a new commercial tenant may have a similar requirement, is it going to buy from a company that doesn’t keep its customer records up to date? Would you?

Tip The DMA website offers best practice guides for advice on data management.

So, how clean is your data?

Data from list brokers or managers should be clean, accurate and up to date. A good broker should know the collection method, age and update frequency, regularity of cleansing and frequency of use of the data you are interested in.

If you are using existing customer or prospect data, the accuracy and completeness of the records available to you will depend on the internal data management protocols of the client.

In both cases, it is best to check the data before you start to use it. You can spot obvious inaccuracies and inconsistencies yourself, but the best way to get a real understanding of the accuracy of your data is to speak to a professional data bureau.

Tip Most bureaux offer a free data health check (an ‘audit’ or ‘benchmark’) that will give you a snapshot of your data in its current state. It will also give you an indication of the remedial actions you could take, their effect on improving data accuracy and the associated costs of each process. From this, you can make an informed decision regarding the quality of your data and the  investment you want to make to rectify the errors.

Selecting a bureau

It’s quite simple… choose wisely. Data cleansing has increasingly been considered a commodity service with many new entrants in the market.

Speak to colleagues and look for a bureau that offers broad experience, good advice and a comfortable personal/cultural fit. The best will work with you to establish suitable processes to help you achieve your project objectives; they will take in to account your products or services, the target audience and the data budget to deliver a good, workable solution.

The ‘big clean’

The value of the relationship with your bureau (and its experience) will be most clear when you undertake large projects. It is important to work closely with your supplier to establish a comprehensive job specification.

As a media planner you may not be able to influence the quality of the ‘master’ database and may be limited to resolving the issues in the supplied extract. However, your feedback and advice on this segment may help your client justify additional investment to improve future analysis, planning and campaign ROI.

It is possible that the information you or your client holds on an internal database may require a comprehensive clean-up. Although there will be a noticeable cost involved in an initial large-scale data cleanse, it should deliver great long-term savings. Data drawn together from a variety of sources needs to be checked for duplicate records to ensure you aren’t sending the same information to the same person twice, and the uniform resource number (URN) for each record needs to be kept on file so it can be tracked back to the original source.

Regardless of the different databases being combined, the records will have a variety of features, and you must establish some rules for these:

• Look at the address data and consider the best layout for label or envelope printing.
• Ensure that the address presentation is standardised across the file.
  Identify the different salutations across the file and decide how these should be presented.
• Have a contingency for non gender-specific names without salutations.
• Consider name formats and ensure they are consistent.
• Use a profanity screen to identify and remove rude words and salacious comments.
• Decide whether to retain the ‘cherished’ address element not included on the Royal Mail Postcode Address File® database.

Similarly for B2B campaigns:

• Consider how to present standard abbreviations such as Ltd.
• Review the population of fields such as Job Title and decide whether to include this data.

Once the rules have been established and you are happy that the results you receive will be correctly formatted and usable, it's time to decide which services to apply to the data.

Please note, before purchasing or using any personal data you should consult with a data protection expert to ensure that the data and the proposed use of it complies with the Data Protection Act 1998. You should also obtain advice from a data protection specialist solicitor before embarking on any direct mailing using personal data.