Data Cleansing Services for Highest ROI on your Marketing and Sales Campaigns

Reaching out to prospects is the most important goal of marketing and sales. But cold outreach is a marketing and sales technique that requires a very strong focus on privacy, accuracy and consent. Targeting prospects with the right messages at the right time, while making sure you have started out with the right prospects on your list is very crucial.

Email marketing campaigns finally come down to the quality of your contact database or email list. Besides email addresses each profile can be enriched with a lot of details about the individual, company and industry. Today sales intelligence data even allows us to add buying signals and sales triggers to tell sales teams when is the best time to target a prospect.

This brings about a need for accurate data in real time. But more importantly, an email marketing campaign cannot perform without clean data. This article will discuss the best data cleansing services available, and which data cleansing companies you should choose for the highest ROI on your campaigns.

The Purpose of Data Cleansing Companies

The primary task of data cleaning companies is to detect and rectify errors or inconsistencies in data sets.
The main activities conducted within most data cleansing services are:

• Correcting typos and misspellings
• Handling missing data
• Removing duplicate entries (deduplication)
• Ensuring consistent formatting (e.g., date formats, capitalization)
• Standardisation (making data uniform)

Another important function within data cleaning services is creating consistent and reliable data sets by going beyond error detection, and conducting activities like validation of data (ensuring data adheres to defined rules), as well as enrichment of data (adding relevant data).

Email list cleaning not only iImproves data reliability and quality, but also enables accurate data analysis and reliable business insights.

Email List Cleaning Services:

Stale data can severely affect the effectiveness of email campaigns. Stale data is data whose quality has been compromised, because it hasn’t been updated at the frequency interval required for its productive use. Stale data can be the result of various factors, such as outdated data collection processes, bad SQL queries, and broken data pipelines. Stale data can lead to inaccurate insights, misguided decisions, and missed opportunities. In today’s fast-paced business environment, this creates organisational inefficiencies and hinders growth.

The inevitability of data getting stale very often necessitates email list cleaning on a regular basis. Email list cleaning prevents a high email bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate, as well as prevents your mail from being marked as spam. On the other hand it leads to a high email open rate. This leads to the success of email campaigns.

Email list cleaning, also known as email scrubbing, involves regularly analysing, reviewing, and updating an email contact list. The goal is to weed out inactive and irrelevant contacts from the database. By doing so, you create a more responsive email list that generates productive interactions with your subscribers.

Let’s look at the many ways in which data cleansing services are carried out:

Data cleansing services can be divided into 2 main categories. The first involves signing up to an online tool or software service which gives you the ability to source as well as clean data. You gain access to large databases of contact information that is cleaned and refreshed on a regular basis. You can download these lists directly to your CRM system. These email list cleaning tools integrate with your CRM system to clean and append data.

The second method is partnering with data research providers that provide email list cleaning.

Here are some of the tools available for email list cleaning. By taking a close look at these tools we can understand how they work and how they can benefit us.

DemandTools

Demand Tools is a comprehensive data quality suite aimed at enhancing organisational data. Compatible with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Salesforce CRM, this tool excels in specific data cleansing scenarios. It addresses issues such as eliminating duplicate records and managing lead conversions without creating duplicate contacts. Beyond its data-cleaning capabilities, Demand Tools includes two additional modules: Discovery and Maintenance tools. The Discovery module helps verify CRM data by cross-referencing it with external sources, while the Maintenance Tools module simplifies a range of common CRM data management tasks.

Data Ladder

Data Ladder is a leading data cleansing company that helps some of the world’s largest organisations with tasks such as cleaning, matching, deduplicating, merging, and purging their customer data. Additionally, the company excels in cleaning and standardising address records, ensuring that email campaigns are accurately delivered to their intended recipients.

Winpure

Winpure offers data cleansing services that seamlessly integrate with your business systems, facilitating efficient data merging and cleaning. Their advanced matching engine enables swift identification of duplicate entries across databases, consolidating them into a single, precise record. Additionally, Winpure is a dependable solution for eliminating low-quality data from customer records, ensuring consistent accuracy and reliability.

Cloudingo

Cloudingo is a specialised data cleaning company that also provides data management and is dedicated to Salesforce data administration. It enables businesses to easily find, export, update, and manage their sales and marketing data. Cloudingo’s main goal is to provide organisations with the accurate information needed for quicker, more informed decision-making, so they can focus on their primary business activities.

Tibco Clarity

Tibco Clarity is a specialised platform designed for interactive email list cleaning. Featuring a visual interface, it simplifies the process of enhancing data quality, discovering data insights, and transforming data. The platform allows you to process any raw data to make it suitable for your applications. You can perform deduplication tasks and validate addresses before transferring the information. Additionally, you can set up rules-based validation to add an extra layer of data quality control. Once configured, these cleansing processes can be reused for future data sets.

Damco

As one of the leading data cleansing companies, Damco delivers clean, consistent, and up-to-date data. The company excels at transforming data into the required formats, removing outdated entries, indexing fields, conducting referential integrity checks, and cleaning mailing lists, among other tasks. Damco offers customised data cleansing and formatting services, efficient data migration solutions, address cleansing, CRM data cleansing, and B2B data cleansing, all at competitive prices.

These email list cleaning services are designed to aid in data discovery and improve data quality, helping companies maintain a robust CRM system.

All the above services function either as tools or database providers. There are few data cleansing companies that provide customised services and partner with the client to support them throughout their email marketing, advertising or sales campaign.

Best practices in data cleaning services

These are the best practices that anyone should follow to have a clean list ready for email marketing. These methods are followed by Ascentrik while conducting email list cleaning.

1. Inactive Subscribers Removal:
   • Identify subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails (e.g., haven’t opened or clicked) over a specific period (e.g., six months).
   • Remove these inactive contacts from your list. They’re unlikely to convert and may harm your deliverability rates.

2. Bounce Handling:
   • Bounces occur when emails can’t be delivered (either hard bounces due to invalid addresses or soft bounces due to temporary issues).
   • Regularly check for bounces and remove invalid addresses.
   • Use email verification tools to identify risky addresses (known spammers, disposable domains, etc.).

3. Spam Traps and Complaints:
   • Spam traps are email addresses set up to catch spammers.
   • Avoid sending emails to purchased lists or scraped addresses.
   • Monitor complaint rates (when recipients mark your emails as spam) and act accordingly.

4. Segmentation and Personalization:
   • Segment your list based on user behaviour, preferences, and demographics.
   • Personalise emails to increase engagement.
   • Remove contacts who don’t fit specific segments (e.g., wrong target audience).

5. List Hygiene Automation:
   • Use automation tools to handle routine tasks:
     • Regular list scans.
     • Automatic removal of unsubscribes.
     • Handling opt-outs promptly.

6. Permission-Based Lists:
   • Ensure you have explicit consent from subscribers.
   • Remove contacts who haven’t opted in or who’ve unsubscribed.

All the above services function either as tools or database providers. There are few data cleansing companies that provide customised services and partner with the client to support them throughout their email marketing, advertising or sales campaign.

Conclusion

Exploring data cleansing services can transform your business with greater efficiency and improved data accuracy. By partnering with leading experts in the field, companies can enjoy smoother operations and make more informed decisions. This isn’t merely data hygiene, it’s about building partnerships that enhance how businesses handle their data.

When considering email list cleaning, selecting the right partner is crucial for advancing towards data excellence. With the help of top-notch firms, the journey to a refined and reliable database becomes more straightforward, setting the stage for exceptional business achievements.