The Data Business on why a regular data cleaning schedule is crucial to build on your subscriber audience
With the media landscape evolving at a rapid rate, having an accurate, trusted database has never been more important. With that in mind, FIPP has teamed up with The Data Business – the B2B-data services agency that helps publishers build and manage highly effective databases using a team of experts and customised technology – to give publishers some tips on how to make the most of their mailing and subs lists.
In the first of a series of articles, Commercial Director at The Data Business, Barnaby West, encourages publishers to implement a regular data cleaning schedule, where duplicates, outdated records and incomplete entries are identified and corrected. This ensures data remains accurate, improving targeting and engagement rates.
West explains how clean, updated data reduces operational waste and strengthens relationships with subscribers by ensuring they receive relevant and timely content.
How important is it for publishers to keep their databases up to date?
It’s massive for publishers, who like any other organisation, are leveraged on the value of their CRM. The quality is tied in with the value – it’s not just how big something is, but how you use that data. Nearly all publishers rely on several methods of keeping in touch with their membership database. Obviously, the old school way is print media. So, addresses are incredibly important, especially if you’re trying to send publications to large corporate memberships, which we all want because they’ve got bigger budgets. The challenge is, you want to send a magazine to someone who works for a global enterprise like, say, Barclays and is head of content management, but have no idea if they work in New York, London or Shanghai or if they have moved internally within the organisation. So, a publisher spends all this money to print and send a magazine to someone who might be on the other side of the Atlantic. They are never going to get the publication. We had a publication come to us and say they had sent 500 magazines to a residential address, and somebody complained asking why it’s at their door. The previous tenant had listed that as the receiving address for their company. So, you have the unit price of wasted publications and reputational damage.
What about those who work in online media?
If you’re forward-thinking as a publisher, you can encourage your membership to self-clean the database – sending a person an online incentive to check if their details are up to date. But you can’t rely on that because only a very small portion of that audience will bother to read that email, even fewer will reply. What you need to do, and what I believe every publisher needs to do in this kind of sector, is to have a method and have the resources to do this cleaning itself. What applies to physical addresses also applies to email addresses. A fantastic way to keep an updated database is through email invalidity rates. If a person leaves their job, their company will shut that email down, and that is an incredibly accurate and insightful way to learn how your database is depreciating. Because if you’ve got these invalid emails, it means that people have moved to a new organisation, they’ve retired or they might have moved internally and set up a different email address. The issue for clients is that invalid email hide within a database, they don’t all show up in bounce rates, but they still impact your email domain reputation and can result in spam labels. Highlighting those invalid emails is where The Data Business comes in – looking into that information, going to somebody’s social media profile or their board member website and seeing where they have moved. That extends to the job title of a contact – has a marketing manager become a marketing director, do they now have more authority and represent different sales opportunities?
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Could you share a case study showing how a media company managed to improve its business through cleaning and enriching its database?
We have worked with a leading retail sector publication for about eight years now. They deliver online newsletters, host in-person events, award ceremonies and monthly publications. They initially sought our help as their newsletter subscription had plateaued and it was starting to decline, because they felt they had reached the peak of their audience. They weren’t even close to the peak of what their audience could be, but they weren’t carrying out any cleaning. Whenever they got hard bounces with their email newsletter publication, they would just remove them. But there were many more invalid contacts in their database that were not being picked up by the hard bounces. Hard bounces only work for maybe about a third of all your invalid data. When we come in and clean that database, we get the remaining two-thirds of that data, through our technical and human resources. So, this retail publication, by removing those invalid contacts, that meant their engagement rates went up because you were removing the volume of rubbish. And secondly, their email domain reputation improved massively because they were not pinging invalid email addresses. This resulted in more engagement, higher response rates and a growth in subscriptions and event attendances. Many B2B organisations want to do email marketing on scale, so they use email delivery platforms which are very sensitive to having people send emails to invalid inboxes. If your data is being sent to invalid hard bounce email addresses, some platforms will start to put you on a warning and could eventually block you.
How exactly does The Data Business go about cleaning, enriching and replenishing databases?
We work across three levels of a standard validation process. The first level is the cleaning itself, using our own automated tool to do the first sweep. It’s not designed to get everything, but it can say if about two thirds of the database is clean or unclean. So that’s the first round. Unique to us is that we then sift through the remaining third of the data, known as ‘catch-all’. The big e-mail validation tools don’t know what to do with this because these catch-alls are protected by firewalls. We go through that manually by sending one-to-one generic marketing research to these email addresses. We’re not expecting a reply, the marketing research is there because it complies with GDPR to be able to contact these people. We wait 72 hours and then if we do not have a hard bounce within 72 hours, we can ascertain that the contact is valid. If we get a bounce, then we know it’s invalid. That’s how we get our result of 96% validity.
How do you then enrich the database?
We are quite often asked by our clients to make sure that, of the two-thirds of the database that is valid, all the job titles, addresses and in which branch people work are updated. We go to their social media profiles, like LinkedIn for instance. Everyone we can’t find, we let the client know. So at least the publication knows – well, I might not risk sending a printed publication to them but rather try and get them on a campaign to encourage them to give their details. They know if job titles have changed, and people are moving. That’s quite crucial when you want to do breakdowns of your database. If an investor comes to your publication and says: ‘I love your material. Tell me how many senior job titles do you have here or how many marketing function job titles do you have here? Give me this breakdown.’ You need to know as a database owner how many of my contacts are senior marketers in the finance sector, how many of them are CEOs. If you’re not keeping track of that, you don’t know who has gone from a manager to a head of department. You don’t know who’s gone from a head of department to a C level. A manager will have different priorities than the head of a department and vice versa at C level. So, if you’re wanting to increase your publication’s audience, and you want to send material, you need to know – am I talking on the CEO’s level or the CEO’s chief marketer officer’s level or am I talking to a manager level because they have different priorities. If you can understand that you can pair that with very targeted marketing. You can get much better results with the marketing power you have as opposed to just sending one message to all which nobody cares about.
How do you replenish a database?
Keeping a clean database is not just accepting – I’ve lost 300 contacts. Those are gone anyway. So, you’ve got a choice. You either fill that data with poor quality bulk data supplying rubbish that is not accurate or validated or you do what we do and replenishing the invalid contacts. By outsourcing that task, you can keep a connection with that valued client. You can for instance say to someone who is new in their position: ‘Hello, I see you you’re the new marketing director. Your predecessor found our publication incredibly useful. Here’s why. Here’s the value. Would you like to take up his membership? In the same vein, you can then go and follow his predecessor and say: ‘Congrats on your new appointment. As you’ve been a loyal subscriber for five years would you like to renew? Here’s the values we think we can offer you.’ So, it’s about letting data do the heavy lifting.
To summarise, basic and methodical subscription database maintenance is a worthwhile and simple task if managed properly. The benefits will pay for itself as all publications really rely on data as the backbone of their operational efficiency and value as a business. By giving that database a worthwhile MOT once a year, you can deliver compound returns for low-level investment.
