Data Management – The Building Block of a Good Campaign

Made Essential Reading on 16 August 2010 Felix Hemsley

In an effort to share knowledge from across the Essential family, I will be posting content from as many members of the team here as possible. In the first of these posts, Jon Warren illustrates how important the quality of your data is to the success of a campaign.

It is of the utmost importance that you know where your data is at all times, however there is one area that you need to consider before anything else. Is your data any good in the first place?

One of the key areas that can make or break a campaign is, and always will be, the quality of the initial data. Without good data management at the start, many campaigns can fall at the first hurdle. Incorrect data in the business world can prove to be costly in more ways than one. If for instance addresses are inconsistent, your company will suffer the cost of resending mail or even losing customers.

High quality data needs to pass a set of quality criteria before it can be let loose on the big bad world. The 8 golden rules are:

• Accuracy: Consists of integrity, consistency and density
• Integrity: Completeness and validity are key here
• Completeness: Correct any data containing anomalies
• Validity: Is all your data valid? You need to consider natural turnover within a company. People do move on to bigger and better things
• Consistency: Avoid contradictions and syntactical anomalies
• Density: A reduction in missing values equals a better return rate
• Uniformity: Avoid irregularities by keeping to the same format
• Uniqueness: Sending duplicates are not only costly but also an annoyance to your potential customers

Follow these steps and you should be well on the way to having an accurate and useful database that will be a good starting point to run any successful campaign. Just don’t end up going and losing it as you may want to use it again.

Oh, and don’t forget my own personal exasperation, correct spellings of names. There is nothing more annoying than adding extra letters into a person’s first name…

Jon (no H!)