Just as you spring clean your house every year to declutter
unnecessary things; the same goes with your email list database as well, isn’t
it? Email lists decay by 20%-22% every year and data cleansing
aka data scrubbing not only helps in maintaining your email list hygiene but
also helps in maximizing your email marketing ROI.
Thereby, to maintain a healthy email list, email list cleaning is a priority in any email marketer’s schedule so as to ensure maximum CTRs, qualified leads, and open rates.
According to Experian, 63% of businesses append their
third-party behavioral and demographic intelligence. So what actually is data
append?
Marketing practice involved in gathering known customer’s
data and thereafter matching it with vendor’s database in order to obtain email
addresses.
As an email marketer you always want to grow your email listby appending it with email contacts; but do you know that whenever you try doing
that, you also invite duplicate, outdated and incorrect data, which by no means
will drive your email marketing business.
1. Data Identification and Uploading
The data that is to be appended is identified by client
during this phase.
2. Database Matching and Enhancement
Here, the data of your client database is matched with the
master database – bringing in more effectiveness by adding email addresses to
the master database.
3. E-mail Verification
In this stage, all the email addresses are to be verified
for final delivery.
4. Opt-out
Here a message is sent to email addresses that are verified
by above steps. The message typically offers the subscriber a choice between
‘keep receiving emails’ or ‘Opt-out of it’.
The responses collected by doing so are noted for 4-5
business day and thereafter, all the opt-outs are removed from the email list.
5. Database Download
After completion of whole append process, the newly obtained
database is downloaded for further use.
Best Practices for Data Cleansing and Data Appending
Before embarking with data cleansing, it’s necessary to know
the best practices that can help you with inaccurate and messy data. 5 best
practices that you can render help from:
1. Prepare a data quality plan
Identify the area with more data quality errors
&incorrect links and prepare a systematic quality plan based on the root
problem.
2. Check data at entry point
Evaluate the contact information at each and every point.
This phase ensures that all the data you have gathered so far is standardized.
Hence, when it is registered in your database; there will rare chances of
redundancy.
3. Confirm the accuracy of your data
Validate your database information by cleaning out your
existing database. You can invest on effective marketing data tools like
address verification software for merging your various data sets.
4. Check out duplicates
Identify the redundancy by implementation of tools that can
easily identify duplicate data in your database. This way, you can save more
time from such manual work.
5. Append the data
Last step after validation, standardization and removal of
redundancy is to use third-party sources for data appending. These third-party
sources can impart information that is fetched from first-party sites.
The data thus obtained is compiled to identify whether it is
complete information for analytics and business intelligence. This helps you to
not only enhance your customer segmentation, but also send specific information
to targeted audience.
Well, what now? How would you figure out whether you have
made successful data cleansing and data appending attempt?
When it is done correctly, data cleansing and appending
shows following signs:
Functions along with various schemas and mapping functions
for data transformation.
Spots errors in single/multiple data sources and removes
it completely.
Employs various tools to reduce manual efforts for
inspection.
Well, now you can reduce the chances of facing ‘dirty data’
by systematic implementation of data cleansing and data appending on regular
time basis. Not only will it save your database from degradation but will also
improve your IP reputation.
So what are you waiting for? Implement data cleansing andappending and paint your email marketing business with bright colors of maximum
revenue and ROI.
Have anything to add? Shoot in the comments!
Article From: emailmonks.com
