Little Know Tips to Improve Data Hygiene Processing

Making use of industry best practices will always pay off because a company's peers and competitors are setting the standard and validating the actions that become known across the industry leaders. Understanding a 360 degree view of a customer, which is just the modern term for knowing the guy who comes into your store, be it retail, online or virtual, means collecting more data as it becomes available and using it the right way.  Handling that data so that you avoid the “garbage in and garbage out” dilemma is another critical element in marketing efforts.  As a result of  attending a recent Experian webinar on data hygiene, a few little known tips for improving the handling of data will be shared in this article.

Data processing and cleansing is the foundation of good marketing strategy and the tools in place to support effective communication are typically available at most of the nationally known Service Bureaus.  Making the most use of these tools is an overlooked area.  While CASS certification is well known to most direct mail companies, the use of multiple CASS certification engines is an effective way to increase the number of records that will be standardized and receive Plus 4 coding.  The impact on records mailed comes from higher postal discounts and more reliable deliverability, which translates into higher response rates.  But improved address quality also has an effect on matching to suppress files, internal duplicates, and demographic files used in modeling and targeting, so the benefit doesn’t just exist for mailers.

A new tool added by the USPS in recent years for improving business addresses is the SuiteLink application.  As a component of CASS certified processing it applies missing secondary address numbers to business addresses.   This processing rarely costs extra and will become mandatory in August of 2011 so adding it now has virtually no downside. 

The USPS Move Update regulations require that NCOALink be run on all files mailed within 95 days.  The licensed change of address database (COA) updates addresses and identifies non-forwardable moves before a piece is mailed.  There are both 18 month Limited NCOALink processors and 48 month Full Service NCOALink processors.  As a general rule running the Limited Service will keep a mailer compliant, however, some Full Service processors have reported that some weekly updates contain moves that are older than 18 months, meaning they will not be available in the Limited process.  In addition, many mailers can cost justify running NCOALink within 2 weeks of a mailing, simply to catch last minute moves before a marketing effort.  The savings in the mail are considerable and mailing to the proper recipient dramatically improves response rates.

While the USPS COA database is required and very effective there are still many people who move and do not report it to the Post Office.  These movers can number up to 30% of annual movers, making a Proprietary COA service a valuable commodity.  Some Service Bureau’s, like Experian, will partner with publishers, catalogers, and other clients to receive COA notifications that can be passed on to their clients.  These match rates are usually around 1% of the customer database and the improved response will quickly justify the added expense.

While none of these tips alone supply the means to drastically change marketing costs they are each an incremental improvement to traditional processing.  In a closely monitored environment where every improvement to the bottom line success of a company is noticed, it makes good sense to adopt these strategies into your best practices.