If you have ever experienced a high email bounce rate, you know the importance of regular data cleansing. It’s just one of those things you have to do. The only real question is how to go about it. You can purchase a data cleansing tool and do it yourself, or you can enlist the help of a data company, whose services can offer a more comprehensive solution. In this article we take a closer look at these options and the factors that should help you choose the best solution for your needs.
Objectives of data cleansing
Data cleaning can take many forms, depending on the state of your database, but the intended outcome is almost always the same: relevant, accurate data that reduces bounce rates, improves sales efficiency, and maximises ROI.
Refresh outdated data
Databases degrade at an average rate of 30% a year, and a database that you bought a few years ago will be mostly outdated. To ensure that you are using reliable data, you need to update your contact details regularly.
Remove duplicates
When you gather data from different sources, you risk recording duplicates. You need to delete these if you want to avoid sending a message to a contact twice.
Add data missing from contact records
Some records might be missing data from certain fields. These gaps need to be filled before your data tells you all you need to know about a prospect.
Supplement existing data with additional fields
Sometimes, you need a few extra specifics to improve your knowledge of your prospects and clients. The solution is to supplement your existing data with just a few chosen fields.
Tools
Data cleansing tools offer a low-cost solution to updating and organising messy, outdated data. These four are amongst the most popular:
Data.com
Data.com’s data cleaning tool matches your data against databases like those kept by Dun and Bradstreet. But, this solution also makes data management easier by including real time dashboards, reports, and other functions that can help to democratise data.
Hoover’s Optimizer
Like Data.com’s cleaning tool, Hoover’s Optimiser improves the accuracy of your data by validating it against Dun and Bradstreet’s global database. It can also remove duplicates, fill in missing gaps, and create charts and graphs.
OpenRefine
OpenRefine is an open source tool for making sense of messy data. Unlike, the previous two solutions, it doesn’t allow you to match your data to a third party database, but it is very useful for formatting large swathes of data and has a large community.
DataCleaner
DataCleaner is similar to OpenRefine in that it is better suited to formatting data than updating old data. WIth this tool you can easily restructure messy data sets into clean, readable, data sets that can easily be shared with your community of data users
Services
Data cleansing services vary from low-cost options that simply verify and update your data to comprehensive solutions that cleanse, segment, and enrich your database for you.
While a simpler solution can help you restore your database to a condition in which it will provide adequate campaign support, it takes a tailored solution to ensure that you have the best data possible. A qualified data company will take your objectives into account when preparing a datalist, and will ensure that you have the right information on the right contacts.
Generally, you get what you pay for, and you just have to decide how much improved sales efficiency is worth.
The best solution for your business
When choosing a data cleansing solution, consider your budget, your objectives, the state of your data, and the potential for improved sales efficiency. If your sales operations are on the modest size and you run the same campaign for the same target market over and over, you probably only need to refresh your marketing data as it becomes outdated. In this case, a data cleansing tool would be sufficient.
But, if you regularly run complex campaigns in which several or more marketers and salespeople depend on the accuracy and relevance of your data, you would benefit more from a tailored solution, in which your data list is optimised to ensure high ROI from your sales and marketing operations.
As a data and B2B telemarketing company with over 25 years of industry experience, we realise the importance of quality data. And our data services are specially designed to provide our clients with the best campaign support possible. We give you access to a combination of data cleansing and data building solutions to help you to create a quality, enriched database that assists in achieving all of your objectives. While the power of automation assists in getting the job done, we rely on our inhouse team to carry through the processes to ensure that all data is optimally cleaned and validated.
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