The importance of data cleansing

SUMMARY

Retailers: Cleanse Your Data Now to Boost Sales and Productivity This Holiday Season

Over the past few years, location data has enabled retailers to create stronger relationships with customers based on where they are at the moment of purchase consideration. 

According to recent research by eMarketer, consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with sharing their location data despite general privacy concerns. This influx of location data sharing has the potential to yield substantial positive returns for retailers’ bottom lines and business goals — especially during the holidays. 

Yet location data quality remains a major concern for most retailers and marketers, with notable research indicating that nearly 60 percent of all location data is inaccurate. Moreover, according to aForrester research study commissioned by Loqate, over half of the 253 global firms surveyed reported that it was challenging for them to leverage location intelligence because of poor quality location data and technology issues. 

Unfortunately, many retailers will end up abandoning millions of dollars in additional revenue this holiday season due to poor data qualityfaulty data sources, and unreliable collection methods. But you don’t have to be one of them. 

why is data cleansing important? If you decide to rely on a trusted data validation solution like Loqate to conduct a database cleanse — a solution that won’t interfere with the performance of your retail website during your annual code freeze period — you’ll be able to boost your sales and productivity this holiday season and outpace your competition. 

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Chapter 1 - why you want to cleanse your data

CHAPTER ONE

Why You Want to Conduct a Database Cleanse During Your Annual Holiday Code Freeze 

Most organizations and retailers practice an annual “code freeze” period during the holiday months, and they have been doing so for around a decade. 

Overall, retailers prefer not to make any system changes or updates during code freeze because they don’t want those solutions to interfere with the performance of their websites during holiday peak trafficThis can leave teams across their organizations feeling stagnant and frustrated during what should be their most productive and profitable time of year.   

The good news is that if you decide to rely on a data verification solution to conduct a database cleanse during your website’s code freeze period, you won’t have to implement any code or changes to your website or mobile app. In fact, you’ll be able to be more efficient and accomplish a lot more with your newly cleansed data, propelling you far ahead of your competition. 

Here are a few things you’ll be able to do when you conduct a database cleanse during your code freeze period.     

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Improve deliverability and increase customer satisfaction

CHAPTER TWO

Improve Deliverability and Customer Satisfaction 

When you cleanse your customer data and verify that each address in your database is correct, you are actively improving deliverability rates for your holiday retail shipments — especially when every customer’s address can be verified as it’s being entered into your database. 

When your customers’ postal and email addresses are easily and accurately captured and stored, you’ll significantly decrease the amount of failed and inaccurate deliveries your business handles throughout the holiday season. This will save your organization a lot of money in shipping, operational, and inventory-related costs while ensuring your customers have a happy holiday shopping experience. 

In addition, with an address verification solution like Loqate, the amount of time it takes for customers to type in their addresses is reduced by over 78  percent, which significantly increases conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Customers will be more satisfied overall when it takes them less time to enter their address information online and when they receive their purchased items at the accurate locations on time. 

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Focus on enhancing and personalising customer experiecne

CHAPTER THREE

Focus on Enhancing and Personalizing Customer Experiences 

According to eMarketer, consumers are beginning to want something more when they allow you to collect their location data — they want more personalized and exceptional experiences. Especially if they’re giving you their money. 

Each time you conduct a database cleanse, you will have more up-to-date and accurate information about your target customers and where they’re located, as well as be able to gain direct insight into how to improve your customer service operations, processes, and checkout experiences. And with the assistance of detailed data analytics, you’ll also know more about how users and customers are engaging with your website and holiday promotions, what type of content and promotions they want to see, where they are available to shop in person and when, what shipment and delivery options they prefer, what’s causing them to abandon their carts, and so much more. 

Essentially, once you conduct a database cleanse during your code freeze period, you’ll be able to shift your focus to using all your available customer and website data to better personalize and enhance your customers’ experiences, both in-person and online. You’ll be able to offer them highly targeted and timely mobile content and notifications when they pass your retail locations, as well as sales, vouchers, discounts, and other promotions. And you’ll be able to learn more about how you can better process customers’ orders, shipping, and payment requests based on their location data, as well as be able to personalize their checkout experiences and overall site experiences, which will decrease your cart abandonment rates, enhance user experiences, and increase your revenue. 

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Generate more revenue

CHAPTER FOUR

Generate More Revenue

It's not surprising that 87 percent of consumers said they look for deals when they’re shopping for holiday gifts and that 71 percent of them said price is the biggest determining factor in the gifts they purchase. Additionally, 63 percent of consumers in a recent study said they were interested in receiving promotional discounts and vouchers based on their locations. 

This means that during the holidays, you should use your cleansed customer location data to offer highly targeted and real-time promotions and sales via notifications, emails, ads, social media posts, existing chatbots on your website, and any other digital marketing avenues that won’t affect the performance of your website. 

You can use your most up-to-date customer data to plan incentivized customer experiences with your brand, on your website, and in real-time to generate more revenue. For example, once you learn where and when most of your customers commute to and from work, you could share more timely discount codes in your mobile apps as they pass by your retail store on the way home from work. Or you could send emails with discount codes to those customers who are in a specific location that yields a higher demand for a certain product that’s on sale. 

Starting the holiday season with cleansed data allows you to plan and execute highly targeted promotional content at exactly the right times to generate more revenue. 

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Maintain the integrity of your database

CHAPTER FIVE

Maintain the Integrity of Your Database

Sometimes location data can be derived from location data sources that rely on geolocation, background and foreground GPS data, third-party publishing entities, IP addresses, and proximity-enabled devices with beacons. And such location data sources can easily capture or yield fraudulent or inaccurate data. 

So conducting a database cleanse before the holiday season starts will ensure that your location data is compliant with other systems and regulations and that it is as accurate as possible for all sectors of your business to use, including teams that need to access it for order fulfillment, process improvements, marketing campaigns, and so on. 

Now that you’ve learned how conducting a database cleanse during your annual holiday code freeze is beneficial, it’s time to learn about what you’ll want from the data validation solution you select to conduct your data cleanse. 

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What to look for when choosing a trusted address verification provider

CHAPTER SIX

What to Look for When Selecting a Solution

Concentrate on improving holiday retail success this year with a trusted data validation solution that offers address verification and email verification via easy one-time batch cleanse — all without having any effect on your existing systems during your annual code freeze. Keep reading to learn more about what you’ll want to look for when choosing a trusted data validation solution. 

Address verification

Address Verification 

When selecting an address verification solution, you’ll want it to be able to: 

  • Standardize and format addresses under guidelines specified by postal authorities such as CASS,  in most regions around the globe. You’ll also want it to be able to measure the accuracy of address data directly against the postal authority’s postal data, regardless of whether the original address input data was consistent or accurate. And you’ll want it to do all of this via an easy-to-integrate global API that supports Mortascreen®, NCOA, and bereavement flagging, without changing a single line of code on your retail website. 
  • Specialized datasets such as CASS (USA) and AMAS (Australia) 
  • Transliterate words or letters, in as many as eight scripts, from different global character sets into either native or Roman characters. 
  • Correct common misspellings in addresses. 
  • Add any missing address values to entries, and validate partial as well as full address inputs. 

Email verification

Email Verification 

When selecting an email verification solution, you’ll want it to be able to: 

  • Verify and cleanse your email database in batches or in real time, identifying invalid email addresses by validating the domain and username via mail servers using SMTP. And you’ll want it to be able to do this all via an easy-to-integrate API or batch-cleanse. 
  • Delete harmful email addresses. 
  • Identify typos in email addresses and spam traps. 
  • Protect the sender’s reputation. 

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CONCLUSION

Choosing a Trusted Data Validation Solution 

While many of your competitors remain stagnant this holiday season due to inaccurate data and downtime during their annual code freeze periods, you will want to conduct a database cleanse to: 

  • Improve deliverability and customer satisfaction. 
  • Focus on enhancing and personalizing customer experiences. 
  • Generate more revenue. 
  • Maintain the integrity of your database. 

And be sure that you know what to look for when selecting a data validation solution that offers address and email verification, as listed above. 

Contact us for more information about our batch cleanse solution and schedule a database cleanse now.