With spring around it’s the time to clean your house and declutter all unnecessary materials present, and the same principle also seems to go well with your email lists database also, isn’t it?
With each passing year around 20-22%, email lists decay and data cleaning or data scrubbing does not only help in maintaining your lists’ sanitation but also aid in accelerating your email marketing ROI. Thus, maintaining healthy and cleaned data is the highest priority in any email marketer’s schedule, which ensures maximum qualified leads, CTRs, and open rates.
According to Experian, around 63% of business firms append their third-party demographic and behavioral intelligence.
According to Dun and Bradstreet, more than 500,000 businesses change their addresses each year, and 41,000 businesses shut their doors permanently during the same timeframe.
As an email marketer ideally, you would always want your email lists to grow by appending them with other email contacts; but do you ever knew that whenever you try on doing that, you might also invite the outdated, duplicate and inaccurate data, which by any chance will not drive the email marketing business for you.
It is a general practice for all marketing professionals to clean, append, and always update their internal customer database regularly as well as at point-of-entry to maintain high-quality data. Both data appending and cleansing goes simultaneously and brings the maximum business opportunities for your organization. Bad email databases damage simply not your reputation but also cost you loss of reputation, opportunity, credibility, and a sender score on a regular basis.
Data Cleansing and Data Append
Data Cleansing and Data Append are eventually carried out in 5 different phases:
1. Identification of Data and its Uploading
In this phase, the data that has to be appended is first identified by the client and presented for uploading.
2. Matching and the Enhancement of Database
In this step, the data present in your clientele databases are coordinated through the master database – fetching more efficiency by adding the email addresses to the main database.
3. Verification of the Emails
During this phase, all the email addresses are put for verification before the final release.
4. Opt-out
In this step, a message is sent to the email addresses which are verified by the above-mentioned steps. The message sent typically proposes the subscriber to make a choice between ‘keep receiving emails’ or ‘Opt-out of it’.
Hence the responses collected through this method are accounted for approx 4-5 days and subsequently, all opt-outs collected are further removed from the email lists.
5. Database Download
After the completion of the whole appending process, the newly acquired email database is downloaded and referred for future use.
Benefits of the Data Appending Process
- Increases ROI
- Enhances customer retention and acquisition
- Allows cross-channel marketing
- Personalized interactions with customers
- Formulate Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Benefits of the Data Cleansing Process
- Ensures the reachability of right data to right audience
- Reduces redundancy and data duplication
- Improves email sender score
- Protects from email database degradation
- Protect Your IP Reputation
Best Practices for Data Cleansing and Data Append
Before onboarding with the data cleansing, it’s always necessary to be acquainted with the best exercises that can help you to manage inaccurate and untidy data:
Prepare for a data quality plan
Recognize the area which has more data quality faults &inaccurate links and gets prepared with an organized quality plan based on the core problems.
Check the data at entry points
Do evaluate all the contact information at each and every point. This phase makes certain that all data gathered so far is standardized. Hence, when the data gets registered in your database; there is a rare probability of redundancy.
Confirm accuracy of your data
Validate the database information by filtering out your existing database. You can also invest in effective marketing data tools like address verification software for merging your various data sets.
Check out for duplicates
Identify the superfluity by implementing various tools that easily identify duplicate or repeated data in your database. This way, you can save more time from such manual work.
Append the data availed
The last step after the validation process, consistency, and elimination of redundancy are to use third-party sources for the data appending. These third-party sources can impart information that is fetched from first-party sites.
The data hence obtained is assembled to identify whether it’s the complete information needed for business intelligence and analytics or not. This helps to enhance customer segmentation rendering specific information to the targeted audience.
Maintaining hygienic and robust database is definitely not an easy task, but it pays off well, in the long run, providing the critical business intelligence and valuable access to stakeholders. To be sure that data doesn’t get deteriorated; staffing agencies have to start investing in the right software and processes to keep CRM files pristine and up to date.
