Real-Time Data Services: A Stitch in Time…

Bad customer data is costly-wasting resources, increasing marketing costs, reducing sales, and threatening your reputation. With data quality being so critical to marketing success, it pays to weed out bad email addresses and correct email addresses at the point of capture-thereby preventing bad data from entering your database, undermining your marketing efforts, and having to be cleaned up later.

How bad is the problem? As much as 4% to 8% of data entered by visitors to a website has been found to be incorrect. When you consider the number of monthly visitors, your conversion rates, and the potential lifetime value of a customer, letting this many potential customers slip away can amount to considerable losses.

As Heather Fletcher on targetmarketingmag.com notes, “Bad prospect data may be costing companies millions.”

While bad data can seriously undermine a marketing program, the effort put into data hygiene, including email validation services, is what separates top-tier marketers from the pack and is the secret behind their success.

As Econsultancy/Adestra’s “Email Marketing Industry Census 2012” study relates, “We all know it, but data is the key to effective email marketing. Having a good quality, up-to-date email database puts you up front in terms of deliverability and optimizing your results.”

Investing in real-time data services will allow you to intercept and correct bad contact information up front, at the point of entry, thereby avoiding the bounces, returned mail, failed calls, lost revenues, and retroactive clean-up costs associated with bad data.

Real-time data services are easily set up and delivered by linking your website with a service-providers application programming interface (API). Moreover, technology advances and newer interfaces such as REST have enabled real-time data services to achieve greater levels of speed, scalability, and ease of use.

The payoff can get even better when you take advantage of the richer set of real-time demographic and other supplementary data that is available, which enables you to profile and segment prospects to achieve higher conversion rates.