How to clean your database

Email deliverability begins and ends with the quality of your database.  By sending out emails to dormant, inactive or inaccurate email accounts will not only affect your deliverability but will increase your costs, reduce the accuracy of your campaigns and cause your sales team to waste valuable time targeting non-existent addresses. 

Amend duplicate, incomplete or inaccurate records: How is your data entered?  In some cases clients may enter their data themselves (into a web form for example); in others a poorly trained or poorly paid employee is given the important task of entering important data and does it carelessly.  Your staff needs some kind of motivation to get it right and more often than not there are multiple systems of record and multiple points of data entry which inevitably leads to inconsistency and errors across the same data.  Reliable data is critical to an organisation’s success.

Reduce subscriber turnover: Give your newsletter recipients the chance to change their own personal data. Some bounces occur not because the recipient no longer wishes to receive correspondence from you but simply because their name or company may have changed and therefore their email address becomes invalid. So don’t forget to integrate links to the recipient’s profile.

Re-opt-in: If in the past you gathered leads by a number of means including buying lists and collecting business cards at trade shows, the likelihood is that you haven’t gained permission to contact these people.  If you want to clean up these lists, the best thing to do is to send a re-opt-in email and remove all recipients who do not reconfirm their interest.  Whilst this exercise may seem extreme, by the end of it you will have a smaller but much cleaner database of people who genuinely wish to receive your correspondence.

In short, poor sales data results in poor sales performance, causing your organisation endless – needless – problems.  By keeping your database and lists as clean as possible will make a huge different to the performance of your marketing campaigns and will ultimately result in increased sales – and a happy boss!

This article is a summary of eCircle’s newsletter "Inside Digital Marketing". If this article was forwarded to you as a recommendation and you wish to receive further news from the email marketing sector yourself you can subscribe here.