Building up your marketing database is an important tool for many reasons when it comes to your business. Your database is the stepping stone in providing direct marketing between your business and its audience. It’s one of the most effective ways to send out important information, lead generation, growth and conversion and support your ROI. A strong marketing database is essential to your business model, from large corporations, right down the line to small businesses. You can create segmentation and target audiences to suit your message, it’s simple if you’re organised. However, if you’re not, your system starts to breakdown.

According to the research from TDWI most businesses spend more time filtering and cleaning their database rather than actually using it.  Let’s be honest, who has time for continuous database maintenance when your time can be better utilised elsewhere?

All or most businesses have a marketing database that is used regularly for communication purposes between their business and its customers. A healthy database allows a business to turn leads into sales, promote an offer or sale, share an event or relevant news or simply keep its audience engaged. However, over time, situations may change; staff recruitment into different roles, businesses expand and relocate and people generally move on. These variations and more can happen on a regular basis within any organisation.  

What is database cleaning? And why can it get dirty?

Address validation is an important tool for any business. It ensures accuracy for your address data so that you’re not wasting time and money. It can be a costly exercise when you’re sending a large amount of mail out to many different addresses. It can be even more of an expense if your mail is not ending up at the correct address! 

Data Cleansing or Data Scrubbing – Benefiting Marketers

When people pass away, mail is no longer appropriate.

“I gave a letter to the postman, He put it in his sack. Bright in early next morning, He brought my letter back. Return to sender, address unknown. No such number, no such zone.”

National Change of Address (NCOA) is a service that assists businesses to update their customer database with new addresses of their customers when they move.

Database Cleansing is a process of identifying and modifying corrupt or erroneous characters or items from a record or database and finding incorrect, imperfect, wrong or extraneous parts of the data and then replacing, modifying or deleting the unclean data.