Conduit's annual data decay research last year demonstrated that the decay of data wastes businesses 拢220m a year. With business-to-business marketing, data cleansing must remain a priority. Over just two years, over 50% of data is likely to become inaccurate and the resulting damage to business reputations will cost far more than regular data cleansing itself. Further evidence in support of this comes from Royal Mail, which shows that 69% of all business mailings contain at least one error.
Although some may eventually arrive at the correct address, errors in the name, job title or address only serve to alienate the recipient -- in their eyes, the sender of the mail just hasn't bothered to find out what the correct details are.
These are worrying figures for business mailers and something that the industry has to address in order to retain the trust and confidence of its customers. In the case of business-to-business marketing, blanket mailings can do more harm than good. Marketers should not be swayed by numbers or low prices, emphasis should be placed on how often data, and which data, is updated. Businesses need to segment their data both at company and contact level. Company level is needed to understand profile of customers and contact level gives appreciation of the multidecision-making process.
The Direct Marketing Association's business list audit scheme is a positive step towards achieving quality standardisation and, once more than a handful of companies are certified, will raise the standards of business-to-business data in the industry. Data owners need to scrutinise their data and be prepared to reveal the findings of this to buyers. Once the DMA standard becomes common practice in the industry, those that have reason to hide will be exposed.
The DMA standard rewards those data owners that regularly invest in their data and provides a benchmark for buyers of that data to compare prices. The standard also gives list buyers the long awaited and needed reassurance that the data they are buying is first-class, which adheres to strict standards of quality and best practice.
To rid the industry of this data-quality problem, we must educate peers and customers as to the value of data that meets a certain standard. We need to turn the tables so that those data owners without the standard are in the minority and questioned for not having it. By broadcasting the fact that so much money and direct mail is wasted we will instil the practice of requesting whether a company has the DMA standard every time list buyers purchase data.
Conduit was the first to become ABC audited and is now in fully supporting business-to business data quality by becoming one of the first to have attained the DMA's standard. If a company isn't accredited with the DMA Business List Audit, list buyers should now be asking why not.
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