Data quality for small businesses: A self-service approach

Whether you’re a leader at a start-up aspiring to be the next Facebook or Snapchat, or a small business owner running a company that’s been in your family for years, you know that reaching your customers and maintaining those relationships is the key to success.

But what happens when a loyal customer moves to another part of town? Will they continue to patronize your store, or will they get scooped up by a competitor closer to home? Do you have a way to send coupons or special offers to their new address? Do you even know their new address?

For many businesses, maintaining a strong relationship with customers is their lifeblood. They depend on customers’ loyalty and good word-of-mouth for future revenue opportunities. So when a small business has poor contact data quality, the relationship they have with their customers can be jeopardized.

As a business development representative at Experian Data Quality, I hear this story all the time from our customers. Whether you sent out a campaign to an older database and are getting a lot of bounced emails or returned mail or your start-up is growing like crazy and you need a data quality solution for a rapidly growing database, many small businesses face common challenges: they need a quick, easy fix, but they simply can’t shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a solution.

What a lot of people don’t realize, though, is that you don’t need to break the bank to improve your data quality. By using a self-service data quality solution, you can whip your data into shape and start seeing results in less time than you think.

To get you started, I’ve put together some common reasons why smaller businesses turn to a self-service data quality solution. If you relate to any of these, perhaps self-service is the way to go.

You have an old database of fewer than 50,000 records and need it cleansed. Many small businesses will sporadically receive a list of contacts from various sources that would need to be validated in small batches. Unfortunately, the volume is not high enough to justify purchasing an enterprise solution, but it still needs to be validated.
You have a vast mailing list and are worried that people have moved. Our NCOA solution is perfect for small businesses that have not updated their contact database in quite some time but know that their contacts gave valid information when they first signed up. We are able to tell if your contacts have moved and append their new address so you can stay in touch.
You want to do it your own way, on your own time. What if you want to validate 5,000 addresses for the year but receive them in lists of 100 or 200? Our Correct Address solution would be the perfect fit because you would be able to use the credits as you go without having to pay a fee every time you want a small list validated.
You need a super-fast turnaround time. I was talking to a small business the other day that planned on launching an email marketing campaign the week before their company event requesting recipients to join. Unfortunately, they did not anticipate that a high percentage of their emails were out of date and needed a solution as soon as possible. With our email list cleaning services, upload a list of emails and instantly have validation that all of your emais are well-formed and the correct domain server.
You don’t need IT support. Some start-ups are not prepared to integrate a large-scale data quality solution as they do not have the IT resources yet, but they still need to have some contact information validated for outreach purposes. If this is the case, you would be able to upload your list onto one of our E-commerce platforms with no integration necessary.