For many years, when you mentioned data cleansing everyone thought of cleaning addresses. The rapid deployment of address management software in 1990s and 2000s meant that wherever you went, you were asked to enter your postcode and then your first line of the address. (The world learnt to enter addresses backwards!)
The last decade has seen more solutions with international address cleansing and the integration into new technologies.
So, the world’s addresses have got better, postal authorities now provide definitive datasets for their addresses and it’s a normal expectation to have address capture and management software everywhere.
But many saw the importance of address data fall. As the online world continues to dominate the technology scene, the need for mail decreased.
In every aspect of our lives we received mail – cheques, bills, statements, direct mailing, documents, catalogues, etc have all reduced in volume. You can engage in a fully digital relationship with banks, insurance companies, retailers, etc.
So why do we still capture address data in our CRMs. Well, from our observations, it’s certainly a lot less than before. We see many CRMs with missing addresses but more importantly, the need to cleanse addresses isn’t as great as before, and rightly so.
So where is the case to keep addresses in your database. As it happens, the address provides a useful way of verifying people and businesses.
Companies House store a company name with a registered address. This combination becomes the backbone for validating company data.
From Electoral Register to Credit Reference Agencies, they all rely on an address to identify a person.
So, when we need to prove who we are, it’s not only a passport/driving license we need but a proof of address is required as well.
The work of verification and validation relies heavily on the availability of an address.
This manifest itself into profiling data.
For B2B data, if you want to know the legal status of a company or it’s turnover or anything else, there are many vendors requiring the name and address of the entity to append the appropriate information to. If the address is not there, then in many cases you can’t append what you need because the name alone is not sufficient to match against reference data.
Same applies to profiling people (B2C data). Whether you want to append gender information, age information or income information, etc., you will need an address to help identify the person, so you can accurately append. If no address is present, then you cannot append anything as the name of a person may not be unique.
In today’s world, marketing is very sophisticated, so if you want to profile your customer/prospect base to learn about which demographics are buying or how to segment your database to target specific niches, then you need to be able to append demographic data, propensity data or lifestyle data for consumer data and company information for business data.
To be competitive and thrive in the new world, make sure your addresses are there and that they are correct.
You will need accurate addresses to perform profiling; remember, a bad address is the same as a missing address.
So, long live address management software!
I urge everyone to collect all the addresses you can and keep them clean. They hold the vital information that can unlock your marketing.
