Email hygiene is central to email marketing success. Leading email service providers and 
consultants know this, which is why the importance of email hygiene is emphasized in their latest reports, along with good advice for cleaning and maintaining quality databases. The biggest barrier to effective email marketing is a poor quality database, eConsultancy reports in thee Mail Marketing Census 2013 survey. This was the first time the survey asked marketers to rate their email marketing performance, and the results were “shocking,” says eConsultancy, with almost two-thirds (61 percent) rating their performance as poor or average.
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This is one aspect of the challenge businesses face as they build contact databases. While data quality is partly affected by the method of capture, data is also subject to natural decay that will cause a database to become less useful over time – even if data is captured correctly on day one.
Time and again, research has proven that almost every database in business contains duplicate data. These mistakes are introduced via a wide range of sources. Data could be entered incorrectly, spelled incorrectly, added with abbreviations or somehow altered phonetically. Often, matches are not easy to spot with the ‘naked eye’.
For ever it seems, we’ve been warning about the dangers of low quality data. Our warnings have been reinforced and echoed by some of the world’s biggest think tanks. However, despite this, some organisations still haven’t acted to improve the quality of their data. And we’re wondering why?
Whatever form of marketing you use and no matter what industry you are in, it all comes back to having good quality data.
Some organisations don’t have any data matching or data de-duplication strategy. That is, they don’t proactively do anything to find duplicate records at point of entry or run projects periodically to find them. But maybe this IS the strategy…the do nothing strategy.
Having an efficient way to update and manage your donors in your organization’s database is directly aligned with your marketing and fundraising success. Your current constituents and prospective supporters are the basis for your organization’s success and whom you’ll be engaging with via email, social media, and even in person.
Without clean data, your marketing campaigns will not reach their full potential. And while many marketers believe that running their file through an address hygiene process equals a clean file, this is simply not true. Address hygiene will only tell you that the address is valid. There are a few additional steps marketers can take to improve their direct mail file before the next campaign drop.
Many of the primary trends of the past several years continue to challenge hospitals and health systems. Many providers are continuing to develop and refine their Affordable Care Act (ACA) readiness strategies by exploring a variety of innovative reimbursement models and building infrastructure for population health management (PHM). All of these initiatives will depend on data.