Insist on Clean Data Above All

What's important when you're planning an e-mail campaign? Speed? Deliverability? List quality? The fact is, if you're concerned only with the speed of turnaround, then you could be doing yourself a disservice in the quality and deliverability of the file you are using.

When you rent an e-mail list it should be cleaned. Cleaning your list ensures a low rate of bouncebacks and a high rate of e-mail deliverability. A clean e-mail list also improves your reputation as a sender with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), ultimately keeping you off their blacklists.

The list you are renting often comes from a database of millions of subscribers, which makes regular data hygiene a critical task for e-mail marketing success. People move, they change IP providers, they make accidental typos in a registration, etc. All of these factors negatively impact a list and increase hard bounces. Cleansing before an e-mail broadcast ensures that these undeliverable e-mails are removed.

If you are getting an unrealistically fast turnaround in your e-mail, you should be asking yourself if your provider is in fact taking the time to cleanse the list you are investing in.

Waiting a day to be sure that your list is highly deliverable is a far smarter move than sending the list out quickly and discovering you had a high bounce rate and low inbox deliverability.
During data cleansing, all records are checked for accuracy and consistency, and either corrected, or deleted as necessary. At its most simple form, data cleansing involves reading through a set of records and verifying their accuracy. Typos and spelling errors are corrected, mislabeled data is properly labeled and filed, and incomplete or missing entries are completed. Data cleansing operations often purge out-of-date or unrecoverable records. Data cleansing deletes records that have not been updated, corrects any misspelled words, and deletes duplicate copies. More complex data cleansing programs append missing cities based on a correct zip code.
Data cleansing is very important to the efficiency of your e-mail campaigns. It is also vital for your protection with IPs. Errors are bound to creep into any database. The goal of data cleansing is to minimize these errors, and to make the data as useful and meaningful as possible.
Successful marketing campaigns happen when accurate data is sent. Unfortunately, as with most things in life—details should not be rushed.

Another aspect of data cleansing is personalization of e-mails. Data cleansing is important to insure data accuracy. Using bad data makes you and your company look unprofessional. Sending a customers' e-mail campaign with bad data is unprofessional and will make the customer look bad to the end consumer. However with data cleansing this problem is removed.

Even the best list arrives with data in varying level of quality. Since the focal point of any successful direct marketing effort is quality data, your mission as a marketer is to make sure that the data you use is capable of delivering the quality you are paying for. If your data isn't up-to-date and clean, your targeted message may not be getting to the right person with an on-target communication.

You need to set your priorities. Do you want fast deployment or do you want quality deliverability? Fast deployment is a shot in the dark and gambles with your reputation in the industry. The smarter choice is to deploy a well thought out campaign with a clean list that gives you high odds of great deliverability, great response, and repeat business. At the end of the day, isn't that what we all really want?

Allison Doyle Eichler is executive vice president, GreatMedia, Deerfield Beach, FL.