Email marketing enables businesses to directly interact with their customers by customizing marketing messages to promote products and services via email. Building an email list allows businesses to inexpensively advertise while keeping customers updated with new information regarding products, services, and promotions. It’s an extremely relevant marketing tool as 94% of internet users utilize email, and according to Radicati’s 2016 Email Statistics report, email will be used by 3 billion people by 2020.
Properly utilizing data cleansing and data appending establishes accurate and current customer information, including customer email related data. Incorrect information can lead to email bounce backs, which costs businesses money. Data Cleansing locates incorrect, duplicated, and inaccurate data, and modifies, removes, or replaces it. Data Appending adds new information, such as lifestyle, demographics, behavioral, and contact information, to customer records.
What Businesses Can Expect from Data Cleansing and Appending
Updated, valid email information will ensure that your company’s marketing and sales forces are better prepared to target customers with specific advertisements and newsletters. Utilizing Data Cleansing and Data Appending to improve the ROI on email marketing can help businesses with the following:
- Recovering lost customer emails. According to Econsultancy, email marketing was ranked the best channel regarding ROI by 68% of businesses.
- Improving conversion rates. According to 80 percent of professionals, email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention. Also, Email has higher conversion rates than both social media and search engines combined.
- Driving more customers to your website. 61% of consumers enjoy receiving promotional emails weekly, and 38% would like emails to come even more frequently.
How Data Cleansing and Data Appending Work?
Data Cleansing is a process that includes prioritizing data fields, establishing a data cleansing process, cleansing the data, initiating new data rules and workflows, and regularly reviewing and updating procedures.
Data Appending is a process of identifying and compiling data, re-formatting and enhancing the data, matching and verifying your data with existing data, and then creating fresh databases.
There are numerous benefits of Data Cleansing and Appending for email marketing purposes:
- Better understand your customers with current demographic, contact, and lifestyle information.
- Improve email marketing ROI with updated information and contact data.
- Improve social media engagement by combining email marketing with social media marketing strategies.
- Increase response rates by directly targeting your customer’s behavior and habits.
- Enhance overall data integrity.
- Ensure that your business has verifiable contact details.
- Increase revenue by sending targeted email campaigns during product and service launches.
Should Businesses Outsource Data Cleansing and Appending Services?
The Data-Driven Marketing Trends Report state that 80% of the most successful organizations outsource all or part of their data quality improvement initiatives. Yet, many companies weigh the pros and cons of choosing to handle their Data Cleansing and Appending in-house or outsourcing with a professional agency. Choosing to assemble an in-house team can require extensive training to ensure Data Cleansing and Appending is managed correctly. Additionally, it can be costly to maintain an internal team that manages this for your business and may take away from other, more integral processes within your own organization.
Organizations can save time, money, and in-house resources by choosing to outsource their Data Cleansing and Data Appending needs to a reputable, certified outsourcing agency. However, it’s critical to ensure that if your data is valuable and private, you partner with an outsourcing firm who can provide strong security protocols, such as NDA’s and supervised access, when handling your sensitive data.
Outsourcing agencies have implemented best practices regarding Data Cleansing and Appending and can offer their services at extremely competitive prices, making it a more financially feasible option.
Where It Fits within the Process of Email Marketing
A successful email marketing campaign can have a positive effect on the success of your business. Email marketing delivers the best ROI, outperforming social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and content marketing. But contact information must be current, accurate, and contain the correct demographic and lifestyle information to ensure your organization is directing email campaigns successfully, and growing subscribers.
For email marketing purposes, Data Cleansing and Data Appending has a specific process flow:
- Incorrect email contact data is identified and modified in the Data Cleansing process so that all information is relevant and does not contain redundancies, inaccuracies, or duplicates.
- The data needs to be verified to ensure that your email contacts have opted-in for emails from your company.
- The Data Appending process ensues, whereby contact emails are identified and verified, establishing that all addresses are current and active, flagging those that are not.
- Contact data is then processed to add email addresses to those that are missing, which is generally between 10 to 30 percent of the database.
- Contacts are also updated with additional identifying information, such as demographics (birth dates, gender, etc.) and lifestyle preferences.
This process is integral to email marketing. Otherwise, businesses run the risk of sending emails to unverified addresses, dormant contacts, or contacts with inaccurate, outdated demographic data.
The Relevancy of Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is extremely important and relevant for businesses today. Email marketing campaigns are successful because everyone checks their email, it coincides with social media marketing promotions, you can generate sales from sending mass promotions to your entire subscriber list, and you can tailor messages to your unique customer base. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect a return of $48!
Major companies such as Amazon, Uber, Postmates, and Dropbox all have experienced a great deal of success using email marketing campaign strategies, and businesses across all industries are emulating their example.
Data Cleansing and Appending can have a massive impact on the success of your email marketing campaigns. Be sure to contact a reliable, trusted outsourcing agency, like Data Entry Outsourced (DEO), and benefit from experienced, secure Data Cleansing and Data Appending Services that can boost your Email Marketing ROI.
– DataEntryOutsourced