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Top Causes of Bad Data & the Red Flags to Avoid

Maintaining excellent data hygiene is an ongoing process that requires constant vigilance.

Here are three areas where you can proactively improve your organization’s data quality:

    1.  Rented lists – Responders to acquisition mailings subsequently get added to a donor database.  Make sure all merge/purge processing uses the highest quality, most complete set of hygiene products. That way, responders will be coming on to the file at the cleanest addresses possible.
    2. Data Entry – When data is manually entered into a database system, make sure input fields include standardization rules allowing only valid data types.
    3. Audit all platforms your organization uses to collect information from supporters, donors and customers to ensure standardization rules are applied here too: website sign-ups, survey forms, webinar registration forms, whitepaper download forms, canvassing sign-up forms, event and auction registrations, volunteer registrations, among others.

Watch out for these red flags during every merge/purge process

Data hygiene is particularly critical during merge/purge processing, when many different internal and external list sources are combined and optimized for a donor or customer acquisition campaign.

QC your data with detailed list hygiene reports to uncover anything that doesn’t make sense. Highlight suspected errors to investigate further.

bad data red flags

Examples of suspicious data include:

    • Hotline names (donors or customers who have donated or purchased within the last three months) with unusually high percentages of National Change of Address (NCOA) database matches.
    • A high number of address standardization conversion rejects. Find out why.

TIP: It’s best to allow potential data errors to survive the conversion process so they can be corrected during the data hygiene process.

    • Zero matches in the merge/purge.
    • Zero hits on the NCOA database.
    • High NCOA hit rates on Family lists. Make sure only Family moves were provided. NCOA includes three types of moves: Individual, Family and Company. Family lists for NCOA should only match to Family moves.
    • Family lists with any Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) hits. PCOA matches only at the Individual level. Since there are no first names on a Family list then there shouldn’t be any PCOA matches.
    • ZIP+4 addresses are less than 95% of the file, except for your undeliverable suppression files. Note that data gathered online may have questionable data quality, which can decrease the percentage of records getting a ZIP+4 assigned.
    • Beware of drastic differences in net output percentages of a specific list between your current merge process and previous merges that used the same list source. This might signify a problem and should always be investigated.

TIP: Be sure to analyze the data hygiene of all individual lists included in a campaign. Issues might be hidden in a summary analysis that only covers the total mailing metrics.

Weird things do happen. We’ve seen cases of incorrect sorting of Excel spreadsheet data and separate house file data segments that mistakenly include duplicate data, and many other errors.

Make sure your data processing partner has thorough quality control processes and reporting in place to identify and correct problems early, before they negatively impact your campaigns.

We’d love to answer any questions you may have about data hygiene best practices. Contact us today!

 

Senior Account Director Ross Fate has 21 years of direct marketing experience, with 18 of those years at MMI Direct. Ross works directly with many MMI clients on their ongoing data processing and merge purge projects. He also leads the onboarding of all new clients, where he focuses on ways to enhance their overall merge purge process. Ross also serves as an expert resource for our nonprofit clients anytime they need assistance with their data.

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8 Levels of Data Hygiene Make Your Campaigns Great!

A solid data hygiene program will enhance your campaign results in a variety of ways including:

Best Data Hygiene Protocol
  • Reduced postage rates
  • Faster delivery
  • Less undeliverable mail
  • Less waste
  • Save on printing & mailing costs
  • Increased response rates

With MMI Direct, you get 8 levels of meticulous data processing:

  1. CASS – Coding Accuracy Support System Certification improves address accuracy.
  2. NCOA – National Change of Address keeps your direct mail list up-to-date with the 14% of Americans who move each year.
  3. PCOA – Proprietary Change of Address finds people who move who don’t file a change of address notice with the USPS.
  4. Deceased Records Processing – Determine what makes sense for your organization and specific mailings.
  5. Prison Suppression – Unlikely to become donors or customers, these addresses are typically omitted from mailings.
  6. DMA Do Not Mail Preference (Pander) File – People who have directed the DMA to remove their names from direct mail lists should be omitted from acquisition mailings.
  7. Profanity Suppression – Screens out addresses containing inappropriate words or phrases.
  8. Donor File Dedupe – Identifies duplicate and potential duplicate records which can be consolidated or treated in the manner best determined by your organization.

Reach new levels of program performance with MMI’s thorough, highly customized data processing services. To explore how we can help make your campaigns even greater, please reach out.

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Data Hygiene Critical for Move Update Validation

The USPS will begin using a new Move Update validation process which could impact your budget. It allows them to better identify and penalize mailers who do not practice solid data hygiene. Here’s the breakdown of the changes.

What does this mean for mailers?

As you know, in order to receive postal discounts, the records on your mailing list must have gone through a data hygiene process called NCOA (National Change of Address) no longer than 95 days prior to your mail date. This helps the post office better manage their resources by reducing non-deliverable mail and the time-consuming task of forwarding and/or returning or trashing mail that cannot be delivered to the intended recipient. Move updates must be done for both Marketing Mail (formerly Standard) and First Class mail.

Nothing new there, so what’s changing?

Well, the USPS is changing the validation method used to determine compliance with Move Update –Mailpieces are scanned using Mail Processing Equipment and each mailing’s scores are maintained on a Mailer Scorecard. These results are aggregated across the calendar month and are measured against the established thresholds. Any COA errors exceeding the threshold, which is an error rate of 0.5%, will be assessed a Move Update assessment fee.

What does this mean for you?Move Update Validation

In order to keep your error score down, it’s important to keep up with your data hygiene protocols and process them through the NCOA hygiene in the prescribed time frame.

Managing how your data is in your record will also help. Small things like ensuring your recipient name reads FIRST NAME/LAST NAME vs. LAST NAME/FIRST NAME will greatly decrease your error rate.

If you need assistance with any data hygiene or ensuring your Mailer Scorecard is within USPS thresholds, please reach out to us – we’d be happy to help.

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How to Handle Addresses with Questionable Delivery

What should you do with records that are flagged as potentially undeliverable during the CASS Certification process or while being run through the National Change of Address (NCOA) database? It depends upon the type of error that CASS or NCOA identifies

Addresses with Questionable Delivery

CASS Rejects and NoPlus4 Records: If there’s a major problem with the records – there’s no street address or the zip code is in the wrong state – it should be removed from the mailing. However, if the zip code is in the right city but CASS couldn’t append the zip+4 code, don’t automatically drop the record; the USPS postmen and postwomen tend to be very knowledgeable about their areas and may well know where to deliver it. Look at the flags or footnotes CASS appended to your file and choose the records to drop based on the severity of the error CASS noted. You can also mail these records under a separate code in order to test the responsiveness to your particular appeal or offer.

Nixies: There are two types of nixies and they each should be dealt with separately.

    • An “NCOA nixie” is someone who filled out a change of address form with the U.S. Postal Service but did not provide a forwarding address. You may be able to identify a forwarding address for some of these NCOA nixies through a Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) database, but those who do not come up should be dropped from your mailing as they will not be delivered.
    • A “potential nixie” is someone who resides on the NCOA database and during the matching process the match wasn’t exact enough to provide a new address but was close enough to consider they may have moved. The USPS footnotes these potential nixies so you can determine the circumstances that caused them to land in this category and you also may pick up some forwarding addresses through the PCOA process.

What to do with your remaining potential nixie addresses? In order to make a good business decision regarding whether to mail these names or not, you will need to test them. Mail them and track their responsiveness. Most of our clients have determined there is value to mailing these names, but only your results will tell you the best way to deal with potential nixies.

Feeling a bit confused about the many decisions that managing your mailing list requires? You are not alone! If you’d like to put our decades of data hygiene experience to work improving your direct mail’s ROI, please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010.

 

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Save Money by Not Mailing to Certain Addresses

One of the best ways to increase the return on investment of your direct mail is to cull certain types of addresses that are unlikely to be responsive from your list. While there are undoubtedly businesses that would find it profitable to mail to one or more of the following categories of addresses, most will not. These are the types of addresses we almost universally recommend excluding from a mailingnot mailing to certain addresses

  • Jails or Prisons: There are few organizations for whom prisoners are likely customers or donors.
  • Military: Because of the likelihood they may be stationed overseas or living on a ship for extended periods, military personnel with APO or FPO addresses are typically excluded from mailings.
  • Nursing Homes: Residents of nursing homes are often not in a position to decide on a purchase or to make a donation.
  • Trailer Parks: If your product is priced higher than a resident of a trailer park is likely to be able to afford, you may want to omit such addresses from your mailing list.
  • Vacant Lots: Mailing to an address where the house is unoccupied and there is no forwarding address rarely makes sense. If there is no house or other structure on the property and you’re not a builder, investor or real estate agent, it’s hard to imagine that mailing to such an address will pay out.
  • Disaster Areas: If an area has recently been hit by a natural disaster, you should strongly consider either postponing the mailing or excluding the area from your mailing. Not only are any remaining residents likely to be focused on basic survival issues, but mail delivery is often suspended for extended periods following major disasters.
  • Addresses That Contain Profanity or Buzz Words: Disgruntled people will sometimes add an offensive address to a list for the purpose of angering the recipient. MMI has been continually updating a special data file designed to screen out addresses containing inappropriate words and phrases for 15 years.
  • 5- or 6-line Addresses: Unusually long addresses are often chopped off on the envelope, causing the mail piece to become undeliverable. Even if your mailing can accommodate them, you may want to exclude such addresses if individuals in large companies are not part of your target market.
  • DMA Pander: People on the DMA Pander list have asked the Direct Marketing Association to remove their names from direct mail mailing lists. We strongly recommend that all such records be removed from an acquisition list.

Fortunately, data processing companies are able to identify each of these categories of addresses so that unprofitable addresses can be easily culled from your list prior to mailing.

There are other types of addresses that may or may not make sense for you to mail to depending upon your target audience and whether the mailing is to your house list or an acquisition list. We’ll cover these types of addresses (including deceased records and addresses with questionable delivery) in separate blog posts.

If you’d like to learn more about how MMI Direct can help you make your mailings more profitable, please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or let us know how to contact you.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Best Practices for Handling Deceased Records

Should you continue to mail to previous contributors who’ve been flagged as deceased? The answer to this question is more complex than you might think

Deceased Records

It is very important to be sensitive to the wishes of the grieving family members. If a family member has contacted your company to ask that no further mail be sent to the deceased, offer your condolences and immediately remove them from all future mailings.

You should also periodically match your file against one or more of the databases that contain reported deceased records. However, in this instance, it may not be a good idea to just remove these records from your house list. The surprising reality is that mailings to deceased individuals often have a solid response rate. Perhaps the surviving spouse wants to continue to contribute to the organizations the couple used to support together, or perhaps the record was incorrectly flagged as deceased.

Rather than removing any records flagged as deceased, it is usually a good idea to test the response you receive when mailing to this group of records. If you have not been automatically flagging such records up to this point, the easiest way to test this is to look at the results of one of your recent mailings. Was the return rate from mailing to this segment acceptable? If so, continue to mail to this group and retest periodically.

If there ceases to be a response to your mailings at some point, it is appropriate to flag these records and eliminate them from future mailings. We do not typically recommend including these records in a future donor reactivation campaign.

Best practices for rented acquisition lists are different. Since the family has no prior relationship with your organization, mailing to records flagged as deceased on one of these lists is less likely to be productive. For this reason, most of our clients automatically cleanse such names from the acquisition list. However, because you have no idea how detailed the update processes are for a rented list, you may want to also periodically test this decision.

Finally, you may want to consider testing “To the Family Of” in the beginning of the name field for records you believe are accurately flagged as deceased to which you plan to continue to mail.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Should you use PCOA to clean your direct mail list?

PCOA

The U.S. is a very transient country. With over 11% of all Americans moving in a typical year, keeping your direct mail list up-to-date is an ongoing challenge.

If you’re regularly mailing solicitations, newsletters or other pieces to a large list, you are undoubtedly already running your list through the USPS’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database. Not only does this cut down drastically on the number of undeliverable pieces you’re sending, but having processed your list through NCOA within 95 days of a mailing qualifies it for reduced postage rates.

An unfortunate fact, however, is that as many as 40% of Americans who move don’t bother to file a change of address notice with the USPS. They may have forgotten or they might have consciously decided not to do so in order to avoid creditors or cut down on unsolicited mail. But even those who didn’t change their address with the post office probably did notify their cell phone company, cherished magazines, and other companies they didn’t want to lose touch with.

A consortium of these organizations banded together in 1995 to share this information with each other and make the data available to services like MMI Direct. It is definitely worth testing whether running your list through the Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) database pays out in terms of higher returns on your mailings. Fortunately, while PCOA processing used to cost several times more than NCOA, PCOA’s cost has dropped substantially in recent years.

Assuming the benefits of PCOA do pay out for your list, you then need to determine how frequently you should use it. Relocation rate is heavily dependent upon age — Americans in their twenties move nine times more frequently than those in their seventies, for example. It is also heavily dependent upon income, with almost twice as many Americans earning less than $5,000 a year moving in 2012 (13%) compared to those with an annual income of over $100,000 (7%). So it may make sense for managers of lists consisting primarily of older, wealthier donors to run their full house list through PCOA far less frequently than a company whose target audience is young gamers.

You should also consider if there are specific segments of your list that should be updated more frequently than the list as a whole. For example, you may want to run lapsed contributors through PCOA every six months to help you reconnect with individuals who’ve previously shown their willingness to support you.

Finally, an important question to consider is whether to update address data for active donors in your database if PCOA indicates they’ve moved. No process is error-free and, if someone has donated to you recently, you may have more accurate data than that in a compiled database.

Figuring out how to optimize your list is challenging. If we can help you in any way, please don’t hesitate to call (410) 561-1500.

 

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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