What is Data Cleansing and Why It’s Important for your Business?

You might have heard the terms “data cleansing” or “data purification”.  You probably asked yourself what the heck does that mean?

If you break down the terminology, it’s quite simple.

Data is the information you have. Cleansing or purification is the idea of scrubbing clean (aka purifying) any data your company may have that is useless.  Here are a few examples:

Duplicate Data:  This is what occurs when you have the same contact in your database twice.  Maybe one has a phone number for the client, the other just has their address. Combining those two accounts will assure that you aren’t sending the same information twice to the same account.  This saves you both money and time!

Incorrect Information:  When you are spending money on advertising, do you really want to send your ads to customers that moved out of state?  Perhaps they have changed their phone number?  Maybe their email address is no longer in use?  That is a waste of money, money that could be going to a legitimate customer lead instead of a “dead lead”.

Poorly Formatted Data:  An example of poorly formatted data could be as simple as a phone number that doesn’t have hyphenation between the numbers, an email address that leaves the “dot com” off the end of it, or perhaps an address that runs together and doesn’t differentiate the town from the state.  These are leads that won’t sit properly when running out a list of your potential clients.  It may cause you to overlook genuine leads.  No one wants that.

Data cleansing gives an enormous advantage to companies that have a large database of past and present clients along with a huge amount of leads.  It is also beneficial for small businesses whose data base may not be as large to make every advertising dollar count.  It also assures that the right advertising goes to the right customer.

An example of this in the automotive industry would be a customer who just bought a new car from your dealership.  It would be an incredible waste of time to send them an email about “lease options” when they just bought a car from you a week earlier.  This is the customer you would want to send service maintenance information to.  Data purification makes sure that you target the right audience at the right time with the right information. Another key benefit of Data Cleansing is that clean data enables you to get accurate telemetry of your marketing strategy and aids in the analytics process to help you make better business decisions.

Incorrect data has also been blamed for various businesses and residential customers receiving mail from companies that are not relevant to them. This is not only relevant to postal mail but to e-mail, too. The more irrelevant mail businesses come across, the harder it can be for a customer to identify important mail coming from your business. Data cleansing reduces the chances of companies and consumers being targeted with irrelevant mail and ensures that important communications are not lost amongst the debris and that they are opened and read. This could lead to your company taking a hit to its reputation by inadvertently portraying them as incompetent and not a company to do business with.  It will also make you become a source of annoyance to potential and past customers.

So what’s the conclusion?  Data is only as good as the decisions it helps you make.  It is about the willingness to be flexible, the understanding that this doesn’t happen overnight.  It involves testing to see what works, what doesn’t and the willingness to allow your digital marketing team strategize to see what is successful for your particular market. 

Let Jet Media tell you more about our incredible Data Purification services and how we can help you run your advertising budget with more efficiency by saving you both time and money!  You’re busy running your business. Let the marketing professionals at Jet Media Corp put the pieces back together for you.  Contact us at JetMediaCorp.com or call us directly at 631-787-8475.