In our previous post, we looked at attrition rates and we mentioned how the average attrition rate is about 15% per year. In other studies we have read, they say that B2B data decays faster than consumer data, at 30% a year compared with 7% with B2C. Any way you look at it, it is a lot.

Attrition will erode your database, if you let your database degrade that much you are wasting time and effort marketing to irrelevant, out of date contacts. Cleansing your data before you deploy a campaign also ensures you get lower bounceback rates, and higher open rates. So this is why we place such a high value on data cleansing at Jericho – and needless to say everyone else we know does as well.

Data cleansing, if you are not already familiar with it, is defined as:
“The process of correcting records, and if need be, eliminating inaccurate records from your data”

It is also described as:
“The purpose of data cleansing is to detect the incorrect, irrelevant or incomplete parts of the data and either modify or delete it to ensure that a given set of data is accurate and consistent with other sets in the system.”

Which basically means going through your data to ensure it is as accurate and up to date as possible.
Data cleansing can be done either manually (Where possible in simple cases, such as manually cleansing your lists before you send them to Jericho to deploy your email campaigns) or automatically (In complex operations).

When undertaking manual data cleansing, you want to review all the data thoroughly. Here is a list of key things you need to look for:

• Accuracy – check all typos, spelling errors and things like ‘.com.co’ and missing or incorrect names.
• Integrity – check the data is correct and up to date
• Relevancy – make sure if you are sending an email out about gardening, that you don’t email your car club database or get them mixed up.
• Format – make sure data such as number sequences is the correct format, for example, customer numbers or phone numbers, as sometimes they lose digits if not in the right format in excel.

If you are not already convinced of its importance, data cleansing is very important to your attrition rates, your bounceback rates, and your open rates. Why? Well we covered off attrition in our last post (Link to post) and if your data isn’t up to date or incorrect you may get a lot of bouncebacks, and if the contacts in your data aren’t relevant to your campaign, you may get low open rates if the email doesn’t interest your recipients.

A well-maintained and clean database will ensure reduced attrition rates, eliminate old, incorrect or irrelevant data, and will allow you to focus on emailingpeople that actually want to receive your email to their inbox.

Cleansing your database should be something that you get into a routine of doing regularly. A good time to do it is before each campaign to make sure you are emailing out to a clean database, and after each campaign, by using your email reports to clean out bouncebacks.

Fortunately those who work with us are starting to recognise the benefits of data cleansing and are working closely with us to get their database up to scratch, but there are still far too many companies sending out fantastic email campaigns that are losing opportunities or are lowering the effectiveness of their campaigns because of something as simple as bad data.

Have you cleaned your data lately?