Address Validation and Cleansing Saves over $800,000

How do you increase effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by 12%?

Make sure your marketing actually goes where it's supposed to.

Multi-channel marketing depends on having a holistic view of your customer and having all channels work together with one another. But for one publishing company, multiple methods of communication were just multiple chances for their marketing to go wrong.

Customer email addresses and phone numbers were inconsistent, stored in different systems and often appeared more than once. The company also relied heavily on sending direct mail but only around 30% of addresses in their database were correctly formatted and they were finding it hard to identify members of a household or employees of a particular organization.

Reputation risk and wasted budgets

All this was wasting money and damaging credibility as customers received multiple marketing packages at the same address, different communications at different addresses, or materials simply got lost and never reached the recipient.

It was clear that the publisher needed to overhaul their data quality strategy. A CloverDX-based solution began with a data audit, eliminating duplicate records and uncovering hidden data quality problems.

The system then validated address data and automatically corrected over half the addresses in the company’s database. Other customer information such as email addresses and phone numbers was also automatically verified, deduplicated and enriched using external sources.

Better data quality delivers benefits

The new, cleaned database began delivering benefits almost immediately.

• Data volume was reduced
• Phone calls, emails and direct mail began to get through to their intended recipients
• Marketing targeting was improved
• And the project delivered savings of over $800,000 now that the company wasn’t wasting time, money and resources.

As customers finally started seeing the marketing campaigns, orders increased by 12%. The data quality solution was not just a one-off as the system is now running continually to validate and cleanse customer data providing an easy way to make marketing more effective.