Here today, gone tomorrow: How business data decays

Our on-going process of research and data updates indicates that the number of business contacts moving or changing roles is increasing year on year, particularly evident in the current difficult economic environment.

This makes effective targeting of marketing campaigns increasingly challenging – so how can you improve your ROI? (Return On Investment)

We can confidently state from our own telephone research of our Corporate Contacts database that:

• In total 38.9% of contacts in the 20,000 largest UK companies have either left the business or changed position in the last 12 months.
• 6.32% of HR and 16.06% of IT contacts have left or changed roles in the last year.
• Whereas some 28.82% of Marketing and 29.76% of Sales personnel have left or changed positions in the same period.

At Data HQ we see this problem of decayed data across the whole spectrum of UK businesses – not just in the corporate sector.

Pressure to Deliver

We understand the growing pressures on Sales and Marketing professionals to deliver more effective and targeted campaigns, often constrained by ever-decreasing budgets. Those challenging parameters make the following needs paramount:

• To reach the right people with the right message every time.
• To ensure that the data which is vital for your campaigns is clean and effective.

You can instantly improve your ROI and avoid wasted print and postage costs, as well as reducing the numbers of unsubscribes to electronic communication, by ensuring you are reaching the most contacts possible from up-to-date contact lists.

Using Clean Data

Having a team of dedicated researchers to continually verify and update all of the records that we hold on our Corporate Contacts database ensures the quality of our data. The overall importance to your business of using clean data is that it not only reduces wastage and improves response rates, but it also enhances the perception of your organisation.

Keeping your in-house customer and prospect data clean is of the utmost importance for the reasons given above. You can easily achieve that objective by utilizing the services of specialist data agencies to relieve you of that burden. By using accurate and clean data, your sales and marketing campaigns will be more successful and will help ensure that your organization will be far less likely to be targeting those 38.9% of contacts who have left or changed roles.

As a specialist list and data agency we have learned a great deal from monitoring our data, meaning that we not only have the necessary expertise but are equipped to stay aware of changing trends – can you say the same of your data?

Further reading: Data HQ's complete guide to data quality and Data HQ's complete guide to marketing lists