New Year. The traditional time for making those well-intentioned resolutions drink less, exercise more, spend less time at work, spend more time at home, learn a new skill. In business too, January is a time for making new commitments or even starting afresh.
Look in the health sections of magazines now and they’re full of helpful hints on getting into shape. It’s no different in the marketing space with offers of data health checks, data audits and data clinics all promising to ensure your data is in tip top condition and ready to face a new year.
But with such a wealth of offers, how do you distinguish the good from the not-so-good and the downright dismal if your data could do with a pep up?
The real deal
First things first. Free (as many data health checks are) is good, but only if the information you’re getting on the accuracy and completeness of your data is useful for your business. It’s like the January sales; it’s only a bargain if you’re going to use it.
The next thing to consider is what you’re checking your data against. Essentially, it’s not just about the size of an organisation’s business universe, but the quality of that data and the sources it uses for verification that contribute to it and how often the database is verified. Analysis of your data should include checking addresses against the Postcode Address File (PAF) and checking phone numbers against an up-to-date telephone file for accuracy, duplications and to identify areas for data enrichment.
With the current economic climate, there’s never been a greater need to pre-screen your database in order to avoid exposure to potential bad debt and the better data health checks around will offer this. By undertaking credit pre-screening, a data health check is able to identify what number and percentage of a database’s records are classed as maximum risk with a high likelihood of business failure within the next twelve months. Other risk factors to examine as part of any data audit include payment performance trends, showing how quickly (or not) a business settles its invoices and the number of County Court Judgments registered against it over the past twelve months.
The database should also be checked against a range of suppression files to highlight records that should not be mailed, telephoned or faxed and highlight the level of compliance in the database and how up to date it is.
The key files for B2B marketers are the Mailing Preference Service (MPS), Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) and Fax Preference Service (FPS), but there are others B2B marketers need to be aware of such as the Business Suppression File (BSF) and the Business Changes File (BCF).
The more files the data is matched against, the better the indication of how compliant and current it is.
Going one step further
If you’re marketing in a downturn, what you don’t want to do is waste budget marketing to businesses that aren’t there anymore. So, an indication of how many goneaways your customer and prospect database contains is essential. But a good data health check will do more than that and will also highlight where it has new details for a gone away business.
There’s also usually an element of selling in free data health check offers. So once the basics of checking how healthy your data is done, there’s also further diagnosis of what you can do to improve the health of your data and its usefulness.
That doesn’t mean you should avoid taking up the offer of a free data audit, but it does mean you should choose your audit carefully and ensure your free check up is giving you the insight you need.
For instance, gap analysis can highlight how many other clients or prospects are contained within a given business universe that match the profile of your existing customers and prospects, either in terms of their size, location or the sector they’re in.
First impressions
And while you’re giving your data a MOT, it might also be worth considering the additional information you could append to it in terms of named contact details or market intelligence information such as financial data and employee numbers that could help you to segment and target your marketing activity more effectively.
The latest research indicates that UK businesses lose 17 per cent of revenue due to poor data quality, so data health checks are essential for the continued success of the B2B marketing industry.
Since its inception, almost 1.2 million UK companies have signed up for the CTPS, whilst the FPS lists almost two million, predominantly business, numbers.
The number of companies signing up for such services will continue to increase unless businesses adopt a more stringent attitude to maintaining data quality and make sure that their first, and every contact they have with a business makes a good impression. Good, clean, healthy data should be the starting point.
