Building Your Business with Quality Data

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Your contact data is valuable, but is it up to its full potential? Without the proper maintenance, the quality of your data quickly decreases--so quickly that 50% of databases deteriorate after only two years. It is an absolute necessity to maintain your data in order to decrease costs and increase profits. The quality of your contact data--names, addresses, emails and phone numbers--impacts the effectiveness of your communications and business decisions, and makes your data migration efforts even more difficult.

Here are several things you can do in order to ensure the quality of your data:

1. Profile

The first step is to profile and analyze the health of your contact data. Data profiling identifies data-quality issues at the start to help determine weaknesses in your database and data acquisition efforts. This helps minimize costs by pinpointing problems in your data before you launch your next campaign.

2. Verify and Cleanse

Verify, correct, standardize and update your data to ensure only valid information enters your database. By implementing this cleaning process into your operations, you will increase response rates and improve your campaigns.

3. Dedupe

Identify, eliminate and consolidate duplicate records into one single, comprehensive record to get a more accurate view of your customer.  

4. Enrich

Add missing elements to your contact data, such as email addresses and phone numbers, to complete your records. You can also enrich your data with vital demographic, firmographic, lifestyle and geographic information--such as marital status, income, occupation, latitude/longitude coordinates and company name--to help you gain even deeper insight into your data to improve analytics and BI efforts.

5. Monitor

Data quality is an ongoing process. It is important to continually monitor your data to ensure you have the most accurate data at your fingertips.

Melissa Data offers the full spectrum of solutions to meet all of your data-quality needs, including profiling, cleansing, updating, matching, deduping and enriching your global contact data. If you would like to add quality to your data, sign up for a free trial here!

Natalia Crawford is a Copywriter/Content Marketer at Melissa Data where she manages digital marketing. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of SQL Server Pro's annual platinum sponsorship.