Cleanse your data and avoid wasted marketing budget

Marketing budgets in 2015 are generally expected to increase to a certain extent. However, it is nonetheless still essential to make the absolute most of our budgets. Reporting on ROI to prove / quantify campaign success remains vital, with all eyes on Sales & Marketing to bring success in the somewhat improved financial climate.

Clearly, more effective campaign concepts need to be a focus, but another fairly hassle-free way of improving the return from a campaign is to ensure that from the outset it is as cost effective as possible.

Cost Effective Campaigns

So how can you make sure your marketing campaign is as cost effective as possible?

Shop Around – Printers, Mailing Houses, Email Service Providers and all your other suppliers are vying for business, too. Make sure you get the best possible prices by requesting various quotes and negotiating before committing to any campaign-related spend.

Mail only to active contacts – You should know the costs involved in circulating your campaign. So if that cost was e.g. £200 per thousand, you would save £1000 if you removed just 5000 records where the contact details are either incorrect or out of date. This will also go some way towards improving your brand perception by communicating more effectively with existing and new customers.

Data Management, Cleansing and Processing

Getting your data cleansed will help keep your campaign costs down and thereby improve your ROI. You can start this process yourself by:

• Undertaking some in-house management and cleansing;
• Ensuring consistent formatting for data entry;
• Making clear the importance of precise and accurate data entry to any staff entering the information;
• Combining and de-duping files based on email address or another unique reference within the files.

Following this initial activity, you will need the assistance of a data-marketing specialist or provider, to help with the more advanced stages of the processing and cleansing of your data. They will be able to:

• Identify, remove, or consolidate remaining duplicate records;
• Suppress or update data that is no longer valid.

Data Quality Audit to Calculate Cost Savings

With Data decaying up to 40% per annum on average, depending how regularly you update and cleanse your data, it could be partially or even largely out of date.

By undertaking our Free Business Data Quality Audit or Consumer Data Quality Audit and then using our cleansing service, you will be able to identify and remove data that is no longer valid, or that is duplicated within your file(s). This will highlight records that are not worth either mailing or contacting and save you valuable marketing budget.

The figures speak for themselves!

The below example from a recent client audit shows the savings possible prior to a large campaign:

• Do you regularly audit and cleanse your data?
• Are you interested in finding out how much money you could save?
• Do you receive a lot of bounce-backs, no answers, or returned mailers?