5 Easy Resolutions to Keep a Clean Database in 2020
Melissa Team | Address Verification, Canada Post, Data Cleansing, Data Enrichment, Data Quality, Direct Mail, Express Entry, Listware Online, Mailers, Matching, NCOA, Tips & Solutions |
80% of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned as early as February! Are you going to keep yours this year? We hope you do! That’s why we’re sharing the 5 easiest resolutions (that you can actually keep) to build and maintain a clean database in 2020. Meet the two tools that will make it possible: Listware Online and Mailers Online. These are the best tools to meet all your data cleansing needs – completely hands-free. With such far-reaching positive effects and two online tools that will help you keep your data quality resolutions, why not see how easy data quality can truly be…
1. Implement Point of Entry Data Quality
What’s better than half the amount of work? Double the accuracy. Implementing a point of entry data quality solution can not only reduce keystrokes by half (like Melissa’s Global Express Entry) – they also autocomplete and suggest verified addresses and emails, ensuring only correct and deliverable addresses enter your system. Front-end data quality solutions prevent bad data like fat-fingered typos, unstandardized address formats and other irregularities from plaguing your database. These solutions have also been known to drastically reduce cart abandonment, thanks to their speed and efficiency during checkout. (Take a look at how HUF coupled Express Entry with a shipping estimator to provide Amazon-like shipping info during checkout!)
2. Merge, Purge & Match for SCV
Databases have, on average 8-10% of redundancies in their contact records – all affecting brand reputation, skewing business analytics and drastically wasting resources associated with direct mail – just to name a few. Matching, merging and purging contact information is the only way for your organization to gain a Single Customer View (SCV) of your valued customers. Solutions like MatchUp are super easy to implement and can either dedupe in real-time, batch or a hybrid process. By utilizing golden record survivorship, you maintain the most accurate parts of a customer’s contact information and purge the duplicated information that blurs your view of the customer.
3. Update Old Contacts
Americans alone move residences at an average rate of 14% (roughly 40 million) each year. This means your address data is constantly in need of updating and verifying. Without it, you run the risk of losing contact with customers who moved, wasting a tremendous amount of resources on undeliverable or returned mail, and missing out on significant postal discounts. To combat the loss of customers, revenue and valuable data, you need to update your old addresses with change of address services that provide fast, easy change-of-address processing. USPS® NCOALink and Canada Post NCOA® processing contains millions of moves and will qualify you for serious postal discounts.
4. Append Missing Data for Omni-Success
We’ve already shared that the customer experience is king and we found that personalization is the key to building omni-channel success. But many companies still struggle with truly knowing their customer. That’s why it’s important to fill knowledge gaps with information like physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and even social media handles and consumer demographics. This will not only round out your ability to reach customers, but now you will have a better chance of reaching them on their preferred channel, garnering a higher response rate and creating truly customer-centric experiences.
5. Bulk Mailing Prep for Better (Easier) Direct Mail
Finally, increasing speed, efficiency and accuracy should all be at the top of our resolutions list – which leads me to my final (and perhaps easiest) resolution to keep – bulk mail prep. Even if you are an occasional bulk mailer, there are still savings to be reaped and simplicity to be harnessed. All you have to do is send in your list and Melissa’s mailing solutions will not only standardize, update and verify your addresses to ensure your delivery arrives to the right customer, but it also qualifies you for huge postal discounts like First Class®, Marketing Mail® and Periodicals discounts by presorting your deliveries.
Bottom Line
Resolution-keeping can be tough. But with such easy solutions to huge data problems, we make it easy to keep resolutions that clean up a database. Maintaining data quality will lead to growth in sales, ROI and conversions, just to name a few. Our leading global data quality and address management solutions also come in APIs and CRM/ETL integrations that can help you reach data-driven success how you want to.
So, make 2020 the year you keep your resolutions to your database and maintain better data all year long. If you have any questions, or need help keeping your data quality resolutions, do not hesitate to contact a specialist here at Melissa and we’ll make sure your data quality needs are always met.