Data Quality
Marketing data forms the backbone of your company's communications, and the quality of this
data impacts the success of your campaigns. Choosing to communicate using data of dubious
quality not only lowers response rates, but actually costs you money.
Cleansing
By ensuring that customer data is correctly addressed, verified and formatted, you can rest assured
your communications are hitting real people. Here at
PatternSoft, we use industry leading toolsets
to ensure customer data is valid against the Postal Address File, (PAF). Not just for data to be used in
mailing campaigns, address cleansing can assist in data de-duplication, data matching, or single customer view,
and can form the foundation for functions such as analytical processing, fraud detection and similar data-based activites.
Suppression
Once cleansed, you can further drive down your communication costs by suppressing, (removing from output),
any customers that have been reported as "GoneAway", "Deceased" or "Do-Not-Mail". Doing so allows you to
capture and remove contacts that are no longer reachable. This is especially vital as databases age; each
passing day sees up to 10,000 people move house or pass-away. How effective is your database? More to the point,
how much is it costing to maintain useless data?
Thankfully, not all "GoneAways" are lost forever. By tracing forwarding addresses and checking postal redirect
registers, it's possible to discover a customer's new address. Using
PatternSoft's Suppression services, it's possible to
attach available new addresses to output data, reconnecting you to profitable past customers.
De-Duplication, Formatting & Sorting
Do you market to individuals, families, households or businesses? Is your database structured to reflect this? By
running de-dupe jobs against your data, it's possible to identify those customer records that have been
stored several times. Even those records that are different in content, but represent the same contact,
can be unified to one record, using our "fuzzy" or intelligent matching systems. Having several
copies of a mailing turn up at one house or business can have a negative impact on your campaign, and wastes
money needlessly.
Databases with less rigorous data quality processes tend to suffer, over time, from formatting issues. This
is especially true when the rate of change in the data is high, and much of the input is entered by hand.
Postcodes end up in county fields, or worse still, entire addresses end up in single fields. And it's not
just addresses that can cause problems. Solving these issues is often not easy, but it's a vital step
in utilising your data effectively.
PatternSoft uses industry-recognised formatting tools
to resolve these common data issues, providing clean, manageable data to re-load into systems.
Lastly, we provide several bulk mail sorting solutions, allowing companies to maximise postage savings through the Royal
Mail's many discount schemes.