Stephanie Zatyko

In our new video series “What’s up Wednesday,” we’ll give you a quick video overview of a concept that we often get questions about at Experian Data Quality.

What’s up with… phone validation? Verifying phone numbers is a critical aspect of your overall data quality strategy. The phone can be an excellent way to reach out to your customers, but if your organization isn’t handling them properly you could be putting yourselves at risk.

When it comes to consumer privacy and phone numbers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has put a number of regulations in place to protect consumers. Anyone collecting this sensitive information must be aware of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) – otherwise your organization could face poor customer satisfaction, fines or lawsuits.

Determining what type of data quality tools your organization needs depends upon how sophisticated your data quality strategy is. For some companies, a simple data quality approach may be fine, but other organizations may need a very advanced level of data accuracy and data management.

Regardless of your organization’s specific needs, there are a few key universal data quality considerations that are important for any effective approach. Here are six tools that can help with your data quality strategy.

1. Data cleansing: Data cleansing tools are needed when an organization’s data must meet specific domain restrictions, integrity constraints or other business rules. These types of tools provide accurate information for business use. Examples include address verification, email verification, phone validation, etc.

In the world of data management, there is a lot of terminology that is used interchangeably. For example: validation and verification or fuzzy matching and identity resolution; these are similar terms that are widely used in our ecosystem. Data quality and data governance are two examples of terms that are not synonyms, but are often confused, and with good reason. These two terms are symbiotic, meaning they are interdependent on each other. You don’t really want to do one without the other.

Those of us who work at Experian Data Quality are constantly laser-focused on helping our customers ensure they have accurate, actionable data. Whether that is enabling marketers to reach their customers through cross-channel campaigns, helping IT departments break down barriers with their business user counterparts, or allowing operations teams to manage risk and streamline data reporting, we are here to help. That last group of EDQ customers that I just mentioned—the risk and operations folks—this blog post is for you.

It’s that time of year again…where the greatest minds in email marketing come together for insightful sessions, adventurous networking activities, and some awesome after-hours themed parties. I’m talking about Media Post’s annual summer edition of their Email Insider Summit. Tropical Storm Colin tried to rain on our parade—but nothing can stop this crowd!

This was my first time at Email Insider Summit and it definitely lived up to the hype. I got a chance to step back into my email marketer shoes and interestingly, a lot of the challenges we were talking about a couple of years ago are still top-of-mind for folks today. That’s not to say no progress has been made, but it serves more as a reminder of the monumental challenge that all marketers are trying to tackle on a daily basis: connecting with customers in the right place and at the right time. Here are my four key takeaways from Media Post’s Email Insider Summit 2016: 

If you’ve spent any time in the data management space, you know that the Chief Data Officer (CDO) is one of the hottest new roles in the industry. While the CDO position has been talked about a lot lately, most of the people who are actually in the role have never held this title before. This can be exciting and rewarding as you get to build your data program from the ground up, but also stressful since you don’t necessarily have a clear roadmap for success.

We hit the road and headed to The Hawkeye State this week for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) annual international conference. AAMVA showcases the latest trends in the motor vehicle and law enforcement community and provides a forum for chief administrators to learn and grow from fellow jurisdiction executives. This year the event was held in Des Moines, Iowa and there was no shortage of mid-western flare! Attendees were treated to a “night at the state fair” in the expo hall, including dunk tanks, games and a corn-eating contest. 

When your organization decides to start leveraging its data as an asset, the first thing you should do is build a data quality team. This team of people will be responsible for the quality of the data and the support of data quality activities and initiatives company-wide.

A lot of people traditionally think of data quality as a technical person’s concern. In reality, business users have a major part to play on the data quality team. We have seen many organizations start to understand the need for centralized data ownership with the rise of the Chief Data Officer (CDO). One of the first things that should be on a new CDOs agenda is building out a team of individuals that can help elevate data management and data quality on the corporate agenda. 

Marketing automation tools are awesome. They come with a promise of contextual marketing, customized content, higher quality leads, unicorns and rainbows…everything a marketer could ever want. Are you looking for a simple way to boost your marketing automation platform’s success? Look no further than an email verification solution.

You can set up elaborate marketing automation workflows, custom landing pages and tailor personalized content that rivals Amazon, but without good data your hard work is not going bring the results you’re hoping for. Email verification can help ensure your personalized emails are reaching the inbox, safeguard against invalid contact information entering your marketing database and help improve conversion rates from contacts you may have lost otherwise.