Data Appending Services —What, When, And How!

“Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen”~Donato Diorio

What is Data in Marketing — Data is the information that needed to drive business in right direction.

For example if you want to focus your business on particular platform like mobile devices in that case the data is-

· How many active mobile users as target audience.

· How much time user spend on mobile devices.

· Demographics segment of the mobile users.

· What kind of likes and dislikes of user etc.

This all information is need to improve our marketing strategies for reaching to larger customer base.

Why Correctness of Data is Crucial — Correctness of data is what we all should strive for. Corrected data leads marketing strategies in right direction and saving the marketing cost by making right decisions. Also some time correctness of data with right marketing decision avoid the marketing blunders.

For example: In 1984, Fast Food brand McDonald started campaign to give the free burger and drink to user on each medal US wins in summer Olympic. In 1984 summer Olympics the two major contender of US, East Germany and Russia not participated and because of this the medal tally of US is comparatively high and leads the huge financial damage to the brand.

In the example brand having correct data and align their marketing decision to data this blunder should avoided.

What is Data Appending Services — The word append means to add something in existing. The Data Appending means to add data in your existing database. The basic aim of Data appending is to fills the gaps in your database. The process involved in it is called Data Appending Services.

With the help of Data Appending Services you can match your data against the current data provided by Data Appending Service provider and add or update your database by filling the missing data or adding new data. This approach makes your database to ready to use with all the correctness for marketing purposes.

Best Practices followed when using Data Appending Services –

· Having Awareness of Your Current Data: — We should always aware of what kind of data we already possess, this makes Data Appending Services task more efficient, because we only add or update what we need.

· Timely Clean and Update Your Data: — Always focus on the updating your current data, because it will helps you to standardize your data and maintain the integrity of recent data. Also we should time to time clean our data which is not frequently useful. Example- You want first and last names, first and second address lines, states, Zip codes and phone numbers in proper fields with the same formatting you would use for mailing. Even if you don’t mail your file now, but might want to, performing postal change of address processing will make your file cleaner and more usable, and it will improve the match rate to the third party data. This example conclude that how your data is very crucial to repair timely.

· Make Decision On What You Want To Do With Data:- After cleaning and repairing your existing data, time to make decision of how you consume your existing data and what is more data needed to pull from Data Appending Services. This step reduce the cost of your Data Appending services, because you are not pulling unnecessary data from service.

· Choose Right Vendor To Append Data: — There are plenty of data vendors are available in today’s world, always choose right and reliable vendor which provide the information you needed. Always communicate the vendor about what is your need and in which form you want your data. There must be a no gap in understanding between you and your Data Appending Service Vendor, because these things ultimately cost you.

Validating The Data: — The final step is to ask your vendor to test and validate the data. Most vendors will provide the trial services to show off their service, turnaround time, and trial data, which is useful to identify the scope and coverage of your data after appending services done with its task.

Having a concise data is a very necessity for every marketer. Incorrect and incomplete data can reduce your chance of running a successful campaign. This is the big reason you should always give efforts in Data Appending Services.

To sum it up, an organization success dependent on good data.