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What do you do with the bounced e-mails after sending some thousands to your customers?

Every enterprise which stores a mass of data meets the Loch Ness-monster of the data handling which appears from the nothing and you cannot catch it. If the newsletter auto-responder system could cry (or even swear like a trooper), then you have to close your ears which is it worth nothing, because the noise comes through the ear-plug: “this is not a database, this is a dump“.

Why is a clean database important? Because the online marketer cares about the conversion, measures the percentage of the number of buys / sent e-mail and it matters if only 0.1% or 30% does not find the target address and fail to land in the right e-mail account.

Why does so many error arise in the customer database?

Although the (good) online marketer try to solve the subscription form as simple as possible (name and e-mail address), there are many reasons why will be useless the data at the end.

- the customer puts a wrong e-mail address into the form

- a bad name is given – it is important, because in most of the cases the marketing e-mails are personalized

- The provider of the target e-mail address judges the sender address as a spam

- if the customer reaches the level of buying attend, and he gives an erroneous the shipping or billing address

- e-mails are bounding back because of full mail box.

Explanation of the colors:

blue: a better newsletter and auto-responder software can handle these errors – they are syntactical errors

green: to eliminate these errors the owner of the data is also needed, who knows what should be corrected – so an automatism is excluded (they are semantic or content failures).

What can the online marketer do to enhance the data quality?

1. Nothing: It is also a solution, but of course a lot of money can be lost
2. He maintains the database regularly: The maintenance can be done manually, but we all know that most of the online marketers and even their webmaster aren’t bit artists so they can spend 1-2 days to cleansing of the data. A better solution is using a software special for this area, with this the task can be completed within some hours – after the determination of the correction from error patterns. However I must highlight again, do not imagine the whole job so that the customer list is fed in the input and a perfect list will be spit out in 2 hours! It does not work that way. In many cases the decision of the owner of list is needed how to correct some sort of data error.

If you have a question about the maintenance of the customer database then please write a comment or contact me directly through the “contact” menu.

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