Employ 5 Must-Do’s for an Effective B-to-B Marketing Database

Bad data costs money, affects customer relationships and results in missed opportunities, said Andrew Kapochunas, leader, customer data quality, for business credit information and report provider Dun & Bradstreet, during a session at the June 10-12 DM Days New York Conference & Expo. With that in mind, he discussed five “must-do’s” for effective B-to-B marketing databases.

Must-do 1
Get out of the 1980s mind-set by benchmarking your marketing database for address accuracy, Kapochunas said. Find ways to better identify and correct inaccurate addresses.

Must-do 2
Benchmark your marketing database for address completeness. Mailing the results of U.S. Postal Service address correction may be eliminating the internal delivery information, such as mail stops, which are essential for delivery to government customers, military, universities and many Fortune 1,000 locations, he said. Manually review samples before and after identifying addresses.

Must-do 3
Benchmark your marketing database for recency. Use the USPS’ NCOALink to get change-of-address data to help reduce undeliverable mail pieces before they enter the mailstream. Use an NCOA (National Change of Address) vendor that does 90 percent of its business on relationship marketing.

Must-do 4
Benchmark your marketing field data’s relevance. “Conduct your sorts, and find out what’s really in those fields,” Kapochunas said, “or you’ll do what one big cataloger did. It found 22 instances of ‘This guy is a jerk’ filled out by its own bored telemarketers,” who chose to commit an act of sabotage. The cataloger, he noted, never conducted a simple field audit and never analyzed its records to find which of them had inaccurate data.

Must-do 5
Benchmark your marketing database for true site duplication. Test a ready-to-mail deduped file against a compiled business match database consisting of the multiple names and addresses businesses currently use.