Whereas marketers used to capture names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, SIC codes, turnover bands and employee sizes, today's marketers now look for additional information such as Twitter handles, social IDs, IP addresses, geolocations, user IDs and more.

It’s a fact that every marketer is now ‘digital’ and every business must become multi-channel. The success of a campaign improves considerably when multiple channels are used to get the message/promotion across. Ten years ago that meant combining direct mail, email and outbound telephone campaigns together to all drop in unison, and this was the multi-channel approach to help increase response rates and conversions.

Now, we can also serve up digital adverts based on unique IP addresses, use remarketing to retain customer interest and send out social messages or advertisements alongside a campaign to help boost results even further.

One thing is for sure. Data is power and to be effective as the modern-day marketer you need to be able to trust your data and ensure it’s clean, de-duplicated, matched and enhanced at all times. With all the extra digital information being collected, joining it to the right individual is key.

Resolving Data Issues with an Enhancement Exercise

Data enhancement has been around for years, but what does it involve? Data Enhancement breaks down into two processes:

• Data cleansing and deduplication: The removal of dirty data, standardisation of information, compliance and merging of duplicates
  
  
• Data appending: The attaching of extra information onto your customer records that are either missing or not yet known

To be able to cleanse and append your data, you need to utilise third party data to fill the gaps and obtain the extra data fields. Using such a third party data resource will not only supplement the quality and coverage of your existing database, it will give marketers the ability to define and segment business targets with greater focus, along with revealing a host of new market opportunities and potential strategies that you might not previously have known about or considered.

Within this aggregated dataset is information relating to site data, web distribution, financial data, SIC bands, legal status, branch information bands, credit score, employees and turnover. This is along with consumer marketing information including income, age, household, lifestyle, credit scores, property characteristics, telephone numbers and email addresses.

This additional business intelligence, fed into your own database, allows for a unique, holistic view of the UK market, your customers and your prospects. It will give your marketing department a competitive edge and accurate insight to use for consumer email lists, lead generation, targeted marketing and direct mail communications.

It also enables you to confidently match your data, safe in the knowledge that the data is trustworthy, to the digital information you’re collecting through your email, web and other online channels.

The UK Business and Consumer Universe also addresses an unavoidable issue of all marketing databases: decay. Every 12 months, around 37% of your data is likely to be out of date and bad data leads to bad decisions and unhappy customers. According to statistics from Econsultancy, 42% of customer complaints concerns inaccurate data, with £125 million wasted annually on mailing businesses that have moved or ceased to trade.

To help you maintain the quality of your database, the UK Business and Consumer Universe is rebuilt every month by data suppliers, with around 450,000 amendments made to the file each time.

With a clean, up-to-date database, augmented and aggregated by the UK Business and Consumer Universe, an organisation will have built the cornerstone for marketing success.

Concerned about your data quality? Book a FREE Data Quality Audit

Book a free data quality audit from Blue Sheep. We’ll match your database to the UK Business and Consumer Universe for free and provide an extensive report highlighting errors that can be fixed and enhancements that can be applied to your customer database.

Tel: 01242 545 340

Email: baa@bluesheep.com