Data quality: Buying data vs in-house data

Buying data vs in-house data
Buying in data compared to in-house data? I think you have to, again, take a reflection on what it is you’re trying to achieve and what sort of business you are. By far the best data to deal with is your own customer data.

Those organisations or individuals you’ve done business with already, they’re the best ones to try and cultivate the data on and keep a communication going. It’s often said that retaining a customer is a lot more profitable for businesses than actually acquiring a new one, but sometimes, you know, to grow as businesses you have to bring in new data to the business. You may not have a prospect list or a prospect database, a marketing database available in your organisation, so then you’ve got to start thinking about what sort of data source you want. I think the important thing all the time is to go to reputable data providers where they can listen to your needs and the desires of the business to actually recruit new customers.

But I think if you reflect on both sides, your customer data is a great source of marketing opportunities to cross sell and up sell and then the new database you may need for acquisition go to reputable data businesses. They are visible in the marketplace. The best known brands to go to, to buy data would be the likes of Experian, Equifax, Call Credit, GB Group, Axiom.  They’re the market leaders; they’re the ones that have the best standards attached to their data, certainly on B2C.

B2B data you’d probably switch to Dun & Bradstreet and the likes of Experian again. All those organisations have the right standards of security, the rights standards of data hygiene attached to it, so when you’re buying data from those organisations you’re sure you’re getting the right level of permissioning as well as quality.

For 10 to 15 pence per record you can buy data. Usually they carry a minimum charge of maybe a few hundreds of pounds. You have to buy a certain amount of data, which is really about covering costs of production, but that can therefore give you several thousand names to build a campaign around and that really isn’t that expensive. And of course all that data will be accurate, it will be timely and it will be in the right format for you. 

My view is that in-house data is some of your best data. You would normally take that on two sides. One is your own customer data. You would want to keep your customer data as accurate as possible, after all they are people buying your products and services. If you’ve got lapsed customers perhaps that haven’t bought for 12 months, using the data bureau market to cleanse it, again looking for bereavement, you want to avoid those sorts of embarrassments particularly where they’re your customers because your brand can be very quickly damaged.

Using other data sources internally? The obvious one is a marketing database, perhaps a names and addresses purchase for previous campaigns that you’ve not transacted with just yet but you’re hoping to. A couple of very important areas I think to deal with there. One, are you legally allowed to use the data?  So many organisations take in external data and forget the conditions and the terms that they took that data on. Quite often you can take data just for one use only, but you load it into a database, you process it and then you forget. A few months later you remail it.  The data owner will seed it so they’ll know what you’ve sent. If they get two they’ll bill you automatically and you really don’t have much redress in that situation. So understanding when you’ve bought data and the rights you have to use it are really important.