Steve Cook and Melanie Smith, Market Location

Your marketing database contains some of the most important information on your most valuable company asset - your customers and potential customers. It is therefore surprising that so many companies put such little effort into nurturing, updating and maintaining this vital aspect of their organisation.

This chapter will identify numerous reasons why the company marketing database fails to be given the attention it deserves and why database maintenance is vital to the success of your marketing campaigns. It will then highlight some of the common problems that people find with their B2B data and how to overcome them.

Why is it necessary to maintain your marketing database?

1. Professionalism - If your database is left to become out of date then each time you send out a mailing piece you are risking the perceived professionalism of your company. Old contact names and inaccurate addresses on mailing pieces can quickly damage a reputation you have worked hard to earn and will unnecessarily annoy those on the receiving end.
2. Cost - Direct marketing campaigns, particularly mailing pieces, can be expensive to create, produce and post. Therefore you could be wasting a large percentage of your marketing budget each year on campaigns that never reach the person you wanted them to. Mailings that are addressed to old employees for example will often be discarded and mailings with incomplete address details may never even reach the company at all, let alone the correct contact person.
3. Mailsort discounts - It is essential to have complete and correct address data on your database in order to qualify for mailsort discounts. If your data is sorted beforehand and the addresses are correct (i.e. 90% correct postcodes), this saves the Royal Mail a great deal of time and therefore they can pass on postage discounts to you. It is possible to save up to 30% on standard mail costs by doing some of the mail sorting yourself. Visit www.royalmail.com for further information.
4. ROI (Return on Investment) - If mailings are not reaching the intended recipients then your response and conversion rates will inevitably suffer.

Why is a marketing database so difficult to maintain?

There is constant change

Every month in the UK thousands of businesses move, expand, start up and close down. According to the DTI's Small Business Service there are approximately 175,000 new VAT registrations and 175,000 de-registrations every year. Furthermore, only 65% of businesses survive for more than three years.

The Royal Mail claims that a company name change occurs every minute, a business closes every two minutes and a business fails every four minutes. They also note that if you don't keep up with these changes, 37 per cent of your business customer records will be out of date within a year.

Of course, most marketers don't believe that their database is as bad as these statistics suggest. To prove that these problems really do exist, Wegener DM carried out an analysis of 51 B2B customer databases. In total 1.53 million records were analysed across a wide spectrum of industries.

The study involved databases supplied by companies taking up our ongoing free data audit service and clearly highlights the need to regularly maintain customer and prospect data. Perhaps one of the most worrying findings was that, on average, 19.42 per cent of the records analysed for each organisation were duplicates.

The following results were found:

• 13% had no contact name present
• 45% had no telephone number
• 19% had an incorrect or blank postcode
• 19% were duplicates
• 3% had gone out of business

This research highlights the importance of constantly maintaining customer and prospect databases. Many organisations are wasting a great deal of time, effort and money targeting the same individuals over and over again. Not only does this make no commercial sense, it is also extremely irritating to the recipients involved and is more conducive to losing business than winning it.

It is not a priority

Another reason it is so difficult to maintain a marketing database is that your company's top priority is, quite rightly, what it does or sells, not its database. However, a decaying database will soon become a priority at an alarming rate once you start getting complaints or when your marketing ROI becomes impossible to defend. It is therefore much easier to keep on top of the problem by recruiting the help of those organisations who do have the expertise and whose top priority is going to be your database, rather than letting the problem spiral out of control.

Usually no single person is responsible for the database

Usually within an organisation there is no sinlge individual or group of people with sole responsibility for the marketing database. This often means that no-one has the allocated time or motivation to keep on top of its maintenance due to their other responsibilities and commitments.

Numerous people have access to the database and can enter information

It is common for sales people, marketing teams, accounts departments, receptionists and even the company MD to have access to the marketing database. It is not surprising therefore that the data is not always sufficiently completed or in a consistent format.

There are no procedures about how data is entered

Most organisations have no data entry standardisation rules which leads to inconsistency and formatting problems within the data.

Common Data Problems

As a result of all the above factors, you are likely to find the following common issues with your marketing database.

• Duplication
• Truncated names
• Inaccurate addresses
• Invalid telephone numbers
• Name splitting and salutation
• Incomplete addresses
• Out of date data
• Inaccurate contact names
• No casing or abbreviation standardisation i.e. 'Rd' or 'Road', 'St' or 'Street'.

Example of a duplicate record Two mailing pieces were received by Wegener from a corporate Christmas card supplier addressed as follows.

Example of poor formatting The following example shows name duplication, truncation, a lack of street address and incorrect spelling of the town. Again this is a real life example from a mailing Wegener received.

WEGENER DIRECT MARKETING (FORMERLY MARKET LOC ATION LTD) Wegener Direct Marketing (Formerly Market Location Ltd) Leaminton Spa CV32 5LW

How to get over the problems

Determine your database strategy early

In order to develop a database strategy suited to your particular business needs you will need to consider the following marketing and organisational questions.

• What do you want to achieve from your marketing database?
• What are the most important elements of data for your business? For example, is it contact names, addresses for mailings or telephone numbers,
• How important is your database to the success of your business and, consequently, how much emphasis needs to be placed on it? Some business types, such as mail order companies, may need to put more emphasis on their database than others.
• Do you want a 'contact-based' or 'company-based' database? In other words, do you want one record per company with additional contact names listed within the record, or a separate record for each contact person.
• Do you want a 'site-based' or 'legal entity' database? Do you want every company site address or just the main registered office/head office address?
• Is it essential that your database is kept in-house, or is total outsourcing an option where your data can be accessed remotely/online?
• Is there additional information on your customers that you would like to include that you don't already hold?
• Who needs to have access to the database and what access rules should be applied?

Outsource

In order to resolve your database issues quickly, it is best to recruit the help of a database-marketing specialist. They will take in your database, let you know what the main issues are and then formulate a solution that fits your particular needs. Your data can then be returned to you in an updated and standardised format according to your requirements.

However, this is a one-off hit and before you know it you'll be back in the same situation. It is therefore important to make longer-term arrangements once an initial clean has been carried out to ensure that you limit the decay of your data in the future. By formulating an ongoing plan with your supplier you can ensure that your data stays in the best condition on a long-term basis.

When looking for an outsourced database management supplier you should check the following:

• Will they tailor a solution specifically for you? Check that your supplier is willing to tailor a solution to your particular needs and won't simply run your data through a standard matching, cleansing and updating process.
• What access do they have to other data sources? Because they will need to validate the accuracy of your database against an up-to-date file of all the companies in the UK, access to a comprehensive 'business universe' is imperative.
• Is the software they are using to process your data the most up-to-date available in the marketplace? There is now matching software available that can match up to 1 million records an hour and use numerous criteria to ensure that your data can be matched to the highest number of corresponding records possible.

Remove goneaways from your database

Numerous products are available that will identify the number of goneaways that exist in your database, including The REaD Group's Business Suppression File and the Royal Mail's Business Changes File. Your database will be matched to these files to identify any duplicates. You will then be charged to have these records flagged or removed from your database so that you don't continue to waste money mailing them. However, be careful before removing any of your data as it is possible that a record may be flagged just because the postcode has changed recently. It is therefore advisable to test the results and then review what action needs to be taken.

TPS, CTPS and FPS

The DMA's (Direct Marketing Association) Telephone, Mailing and Fax Preference Services enable consumers and UK companies to opt out of receiving unsolicited messages by telephone, post or fax. Your company is therefore obliged by law to ensure that any organisations or consumers signed up to these registers have their wishes respected.

In B2B marketing you must ensure that your database is appended with TPS (Telephone Preference Service), CTPS (Corporate Telephone Preference Service) and FPS (Fax preference Service) flags if you wish to use these mediums of communication in your marketing activities. The MPS (Mailing Preference Service) only applies when you are mailing consumers. (See Chapter XX - Making it legal).

It is also important that you keep your database up to date with any requests you receive from organisations asking not to be sent mailings or receive telephone calls or faxes from you. This could be a result of previous campaigns that you have carried out or of sales prospecting calls.

Set data entry standards

Setting data entry standards is essential in ensuring that you continue to keep your database in the best possible condition. There is no point in having it standardised and cleansed only to be in the same situation a few months later because people are still entering information in the same way they always have.

Here are some examples of the kind of data entry rules you need to consider:

Ensuring that full address details are entered and that contact names are always present is an essential part of this process.

A marketing department may also want to consider information that is useful to them. For example, it may be useful to make some fields compulsory, such as where a lead came from for example, in order to track the success of your campaigns.

Set rules about record creation

Setting rules about new record creation will help to avoid duplicates on your database. For example, if the company name, pos tcode and telephone number are all checked to see whether a record is already on the database before a new record is created, then the number of duplicates will be dramatically reduced. The above data entry standards will also help to ensure that records can easily be found on the database and will therefore help to reduce the creation of duplicates further.

Take responsibility

It is important that either one person or a small group of individuals from any relevant departments take responsibility for the maintenance of the database. This will ensure that it gets the focus it needs.

Summary

There are numerous options available to you when it comes to maintaining your marketing database in order to ensure that you get the most out of it.

You can outsource everything if you wish, budgets willing, or you can develop a plan yourself using numerous suppliers to gradually improve your database over a longer period of time.

Moreover there are plenty of simple practises that can be put in place internally within your organisation to limit the decay of your data in the future.

The best solution is probably to use a mix of all these options to create a tailored solution that works well for your business and the needs of your database.

If you have any questions, or if you'd like more advice on maintaining a B2B database, email us at stevecook@wegenerdm.co.uk or, melaniesmith@wegenerdm.co.uk

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