Prepare For Black Friday & Cyber Monday

In 2018, UK shoppers spent a reported £1.23 billion over the Black Friday weekend. Despite footfall to high street stores being down year on year, online sales soared by 46% year on year. With the retail landscape constantly changing, it’s now more important than ever to ensure your own house is in order to achieve maximum sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Technology and data are key to this success.

For example, 19% of businesses claim to have lost customers as a result of having inaccurate data, however, 49% of CEOs cite lack of analytical talent as being the root cause of data inadequacy. Take a look below at the five ways a bespoke data cleansing service can help your marketing prosper ahead of this major spending holiday.

1. Audit Your Data

First you need to think about what data you hold, and where. Conducting a comprehensive audit of your company data will enable you to see exactly what information you have about your customers. This is particularly useful if there are numerous databases in various locations across the organisation.

However, only 54% of businesses know where their data is stored. This can be particularly troublesome when it comes to processing and locating customer information. Siloed data will prohibit staff members from pulling out customer details which could cause issues further down the line.

2. Migrate Your Records

Once the disparate data has been located, a specialist data cleansing team will be able to migrate your records, improving it along the way. This in effect will achieve a single customer view, which is vital considering there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day.

The benefits of having a single view of your data are endless. For example, the accuracy of your database will vastly improve meaning you’ll save lots of time when handling data, therefore, increasing your company’s efficiency.

3. Reduce Mailing Costs

Saving time and money are at the top of most business decision makers’ list. Did you know that 48% of UK employees waste three or more hours a day using inefficient systems? If your data management processes aren’t highlighting duplicate records in your database, this can result in inefficient marketing by sending mailings to the same person more than once.

Not only will this annoy your customers and prospects, but your business will be spending unnecessary amounts of money that could be injected into other areas of the company. Bespoke data cleansing will help combat this by eradicating duplicated customer records from your files. Hopewiser’s Bureau services conducts the cleansing for you, meaning you needn’t worry about lacking data skills.

4. Improve Customer Relations

Customer retention is just as important as procuring new ones this Black Friday, therefore, improving and maintaining your customer relations is a must. In fact, it’s predicted that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Ensuring you have the correct information about your customers in your database will help improve relationships. This can be tricky considering that 9,590 households move and 1,500 people die on a daily basis. Marketing to the wrong address or deceased persons could damage customer relations and ultimately your brand image. After all, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand after one bad experience, and 92% will completely abandon after two or three negative interactions.

Hopewiser’s Bureau team use our state-of-the-art data cleansing software to match business data against a series of suppression files to highlight deceased and mover records. Cleaning your data ahead of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing campaign will help you get a clearer view of your database.

5. Protect Your Brand Image

Further to what we said about improving customer relations, another way a bespoke Bureau service can help your business is by protecting your brand image. Did you know, people will pay 22% more for certain products if the company has a good reputation?

Customer data rarely stays accurate for long due to natural decay, with business data decaying on average by 37% a year and consumer data by 13%. Using a reputable data cleansing solution who receives daily Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) updates will help ensure your data is of the highest quality, thus protecting your brand’s reputation.

Find out more about bespoke data cleansing in our new downloadable guide, The Single Source of Truth.