Data Hygiene Services
What is Data Hygiene?
The start to every successful direct mail campaign begins with having clean data. Even the best offer that a company could send out will not succeed if the mail piece is being sent to duplicate records, outdated addresses, or people who have moved. Every piece of undeliverable mail costs the mailer more than the price of postage, it wastes printing, personalization, fulfillment expenses, and a potential waste of a new customer.
Whether you’re preparing your own customer database or a rented mailing list, practicing and maintaining good data hygiene can help maximize your campaign’s budget, improves your mail piece’s engagement, and your return on investment. Geon offers a variety of data hygiene services that are designed to make your database more accurate, complete, and effective.
Why Does Data Hygiene Matter?
As time passes, databases become less accurate, at no fault of the database’s manager. People are naturally going to move, change their name, pass away, and more. For businesses, they are going to go out of business, merge, move buildings, and change their employee headcount. Due to this, even small data entry mistakes can create duplicate and incomplete records.
Without proper maintenance, these issues will lead to:
- Higher postage costs
- More returned mail
- Duplicate mailings
- A lower response rate
- Inaccurate reporting
- A poor customer experience
By ensuring that your database has routine maintenance, this can help your marketing budget reach real, reachable prospects instead of trying to reach individuals or businesses that haven’t resided somewhere in five years. For more information on other ways to tell if a mailing list is updated, check out Geon’s article on what makes a good mailing list.
Customer Profiling
Understanding who your best customers are is the first step towards finding more of them. Customer profiling is the process of analyzing the characteristics and traits that your existing customers have in common. These characteristics might include aspects such as shared demographics, purchasing behavior, geographic location, business type, income ranges, industry, or many more factors. Once these patterns have been identified, Geon is able to help you locate additional prospects who are closely resembled to your current customer base, which improves the chances of a successful future mailing campaign.
Data Modeling
Not every prospect that you have has an equal chance of becoming a customer of yours. Data modeling uses statistical analysis to help identify the characteristics, traits, and similarities that are shared by your highest-value customers. Those shared characteristics are then deployed to find additional prospects who share those similarities with your existing customer base.
By doing this, data modeling helps focus your campaign budget on audiences that are statistically much more likely to respond, rather than broadly advertising to individuals that have a much lower chance of engagement.
Additional Data Hygiene Services
Geon offers a variety of other database maintenance services, including:
- CASS Certification
- NCOA processing
- Duplicate record removal
- Address standardization
- Decreased suppression
- Merge/purge processing
- Customer suppression files
- Database standardization
- Custom database cleansing
If you’re unsure what your database needs, Geon can review your file, and can recommend the services that will provide you and your database with the greatest improvement. Contact Geon here, and let us know what you need.