Four tips to clean up your customer data

As marketers become much more data-driven, it’s important to evaluate both the quality and quantity of your data. Here are four data cleaning tips to consider:

1. Hygiene

Scheduling routine hygiene cycles for your data file is essential for maintaining data quality. Your full file should go through the hygiene process. Often times, marketers only hygiene their active mail file—consider your entire file.

With data-driven actions and the increased desire for personalization from your customers, you want to make sure that you have the right information on file and know which customers have moved away or moved on from your brand. Missing these simple updates can have you targeting the wrong people and turning them away from your offer and future communications.

2. Connect the dots

You may have email-only records of existing customers that you have a postal address on but you just can’t make that connection. Linking their email activity to their postal provides additional information on their engagement with your brand.

Knowing what they are opening and clicking through gives you additional insights to what they are expecting from you so leverage that, along with their previous spend, to make your offers more targeted.

3. Determine what’s meaningful

Don’t get caught up in ‘constant segmentation.’ Understand the differences between your active and inactive customers.

Your mindset must shift from segmentation to audiences. It is no longer your recently acquired customer (zero to three months ago), that’s purchased two times and has spent US$75 on each purchase. It’s now about your audience that fits the profile of a 'big spender parent' versus 'starting-out adult'.

Going from segments to audiences can be a challenging migration so start by having these audiences overlay your segments, which will allow you to see the dominant audiences that you should focus on first.

4. Spring on the unexpected

Data is power, whether it’s about digital or offline interactions. By cleaning up your data files you will gain a clearer picture about your customers. Leverage your data insights to identify and create opportunities that surprise and delight your customers offline and online.

It’s important to stop and evaluate periodically what’s working and what’s not. Data tells a story and one that you need to keep front and center. Cleaning up your data files will allow you to see things more clearly, gain a better customer view and more effectively reach your customers.

Polly Wong is analytic consultant, APAC, with Epsilon