Many personal New Year’s resolutions seem to be related to improving physical or mental health, organizing, or the new trend of focusing on one word for the year. Do you also set business resolutions? And are any of them still in practice, as we pass mid-month of January?

In addition to purging from your drawers and refrigerator, this is the perfect time of year to clean up your….DATABASE! 

Keeping your customer lists up to date will allow you to better target your marketing efforts, save money, stop overuse of your lists, and hopefully increase the value per name.

Here are 5 easy ideas to clean your database now:

1. Do a quick data review to see if all your lists are actually in one technology platform. Is there a department “hoarding” lists? (Trust me, you might be surprised). A customer might be a super-user of your brand—subscribing, attending 3 webinars, and visiting the website—and having this combined knowledge can give you an opportunity better direct future offerings.
2. Try to re-engage people who have not opened an email in a specified time period (1 year, 18 months).  Send them an offer, asking them to confirm their interest or for a missing piece of data.  If they don’t respond, you can flag them as inactive for now. This should help to improve engagement numbers on future email sends, once the non-respondents are removed from a campaign.
3. There are many services that can inexpensively append missing data for company fields like SIC codes, sales volume, number of retail locations, corporate URL’s, phone numbers. 
4. Have someone upgrade titles if you select lists by title or function groupings [ie. corporate management, research, marketing]. If you are missing title codes—but have their full title from when they complete a form or from a purchased list- on your file, you can do this using a program like Excel.
5. Normalize company names on your file, if you get many requests to pull by specific segment or larger companies.  An example of how company names are added to your database that can be combined might be JP Morgan, JPMorgan, Chase, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Chase Bank could all be combined to JP Morgan Chase.  Another benefit to this is if you sometimes want to pull counts by sales volume, Fortune 1000 ranking, SIC, etc, you can get a bigger list if you include all the name variations.  If you have a large database, there are outside services that can do this, though they are not cheap. Otherwise, this is another project that can be done on Excel.

Like a New Year’s resolution, start simple.  Test one of these database cleansing efforts. Seeing the results on your audience knowledge and marketing efforts will hopefully inspire you to do some additional efforts.

The journey continues. Cindy