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The true cost of poor quality data

If your data is in a poor state, it will cost you money every time you run a campaign. But it doesn't have to be this way.

In many organisations, the data held on customers and prospects is in a very poor condition. But often, this situation is allowed to persist because data is such an intangible asset, and in the cut and thrust of preparing and executing campaigns, the true state of the company's data quality and indeed its data strategy, is all too easily overlooked. As an example, a company may mail 50,000 prospects and achieve 1,000 responses; a 2% response rate. If that's in line with normal campaign results, then on the face of it, there's little cause for concern.

But let's assume that 2,000 of those mailing packs, that cost £1 each to produce and mail, went to people who no longer live at the address the company has on file for them. Another 500 went to people who had died. And another 1,000 packs were duplicates, i.e., the same mailing pack sent to 500 different people, twice.

That's £3,000 in hard cash wasted for starters. Add in the damage to the brand in question, which will be perceived as environmentally unsound by some of the recipients, and crass and insensitive by others, and the true cost of poor quality data starts to become apparent. Not only that, but if you remove the 3,000 wasted mailing packs from the mailing in the first instance, then the response rate is not 2% (1,000 over 50,000) but 2.13% (1,000 over 47,000). That's a 6.5% increase on the actual response rate for a campaign that would have cost less money to carry out.

These figures may be made up, but they are perfectly achievable if you use a suppression tool such as Batch with Suppression to help you stop mailing people who can't or won't respond, or a profiling tool such as Mosaic to target your mailings more accurately at people more likely to respond.

Please complete the form below to find out more about the true cost of poor-quality data, and how you can put things right.