News
 Getting
Your Data Shaped Up Before You Ship Out
By Lisa
Berman-Calitri, director of new business, CGSM
Last month I started training for my annual 170-mile
bicycle ride along the beautiful Jersey Shore.
Riding on an indoor “trainer” is not the most
exciting thing to do, but it's necessary when
preparing for a long ride. Well, it's the same story
with customer data.
As I was pedaling, I realized that training and
fitness are very similar to maintaining house data
files. Take, for instance, the fact that by human
error data often can be entered into wrong fields.
This can lead to all kinds of evaluation errors and
even the sending of incorrect messages to prospects
and customers.
For example, it really bothers me to receive two
direct mail pieces that are either exactly the same
or have some minor difference in the name and
address field.
“Lisa Berman-Calitri” and “Lisa Calitri”
What a waste. Consider how wasteful it is for a
marketer to send multiple pieces of the same mail to
multiple locations (home and office) or even
multiple names at a single household. It is simply
an issue that could be resolved by doing a better
job of
purging duplicates and/or taking a closer
look at multiple pieces going to a single address.
Additional unnecessary expenses are encountered when
your mailing is undeliverable-as-addressed, your
prospect moves, or you lose
postal discounts for
mailings that simply don't comply with postal
certifications.
All of this can cost you big bucks — just because
your data isn't ready for action. Can you really
afford not to clean your house files? Let's get back
to staying healthy. One of the best ways of staying
healthy is preventative care. I know, you don't like
doctors — me either — but preventative care is the
right way to go. It's the same with data; it needs
to be properly maintained in order to perform.
When was the last time you cleaned your address
files?
How current are your addresses? According to
a USPS study, 42 million people changed their
addresses in 2006 alone. Think about what that means
in 2008, during a housing downturn.
How much money is your company contributing toward
the nearly $2 billion the USPS estimates slips
through the cracks due to (among other things), bad
data? Do your addresses make sense? Are there
abbreviations or misinformation? Do you have a lot
of duplicate address and data record information? Do
you know if any individual file has been corrupted
when uploading new information?
One last thought: Now that you are jumping into
action and shaping up your direct mail data,
remember to pay attention to your
e-mail data too!
How many e-mail addresses in your house file are
like jane.sample@company.cm? No, that's not a
misspelling in this article — but is it in your file
that way? What about dead e-mail addresses? When I
receive multiple e-mails for the same offering, this
too can become very annoying.
So before you have your next e-mail blast or
mailing, think about data hygiene and shaping up
your data. Making sure your data is in the “best
shape possible” is a real workout that's worthwhile!
---Source: DM News May 21, 2008
newsletter (www.dmnews.com). Lisa Berman-Calitri can
be reached at lisab@cgsm.com.
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