B-to-B Data Hygiene: How the Pros Do It
Customer information tends to degrade at rates as high as 4-6% per month, what with companies going out of business, employees changing jobs or titles, or mailrooms introducing new procedures. Compounding this, marketers often find employees have entered data incorrectly, or incompletely, or in the wrong field.
It’s no wonder that salespeople end up screaming, “Our data is a mess!” Or that marketers struggle with undeliverable mail, and declining telemarketing complete rates—not to mention uncertainty in analyzing their results.
So what can business marketers do to keep their data fresh? We have identified three approaches. Each has its place, and smart marketers use them all, in judicious combination.
- Enter it right in the first place. When data is gathered, say, from orders or inquiries, it will be entered into your system, whether by a clerk or by a sales rep.Your goal is to increase the likelihood that the entered data is error free. The secret lies in standards, known as IES, or Input Editing Standards. One useful resource for developing your standards is Publication 28, available for free from the United States Postal Service. You will also benefit from a program to train and motivate your key-entry personnel on how to follow the standards.
- Ongoing manual updates. Long-term success relies on a systematic approach to keeping in touch with your customer base and capturing information on changes or necessary corrections. Here are some tips for putting in place an effective process:
- Segment your customer file, and invest more in data accuracy on the more valuable segments. For example, you might conduct regular quarterly outbound queries to your top customers via telephone but use e-mail or postal mail to your less active segments.
- Create a self-service Web site, and invite your customers to keep their data updated for you.
- Don’t ask your salespeople to keep the data clean. This is not good use of their skills—or their salaries. Responsibility for the database—and its accuracy—should be the province of marketing.
- Use first-class postage for any direct-mail contact with your file and use the nixies [I’m not sure what a nixie is?] to update the file regularly.
- Send your file out for regular automated corrections. A variety of service bureaus are skilled in address standardization and clean-up. So take advantage. Some points to keep in mind:
- When selecting a vendor, ask about their experience with B-to-B files—a very different animal from consumer data. Companies with strong B-to-B experience include Acxiom, Anchor Computer, Commerce Register, Creative Automation, Dataflux, Donnelley, D&B, Experian, Group 1, Harte-Hanks and MSC.
- Do not confuse clean-up with de-duplication. Data hygiene means correcting inaccurate fields, and standardizing formats and data elements. Ask your vendors how they define hygiene.
- Do not confuse clean-up with data append. The hygiene process will only update your postal address data, and the USPS is the arbiter of what is right or clean. Don’t expect the automated hygiene process to provide you with new or even corrected data on titles, fax numbers, phone numbers or e-mail addresses. Many vendors can supply these data points via data append services, but you need to negotiate that separately.
- Don’t rely on the vendor to write the instructions—do it yourself. If you are talking to several vendors, you may want to ask vendor candidates to conduct a small comparative test—at no charge—on a sample of your data.
Don’t stint on data hygiene. It can be a pain in the neck, but you’ll find that the benefit in increased sales and customer satisfaction more than pays off.