Spring at last, nature’s time of renewal, and an opportunity to dust off the cobwebs, water blast the pavers and have a jolly good tidy up around the home.

At work, there’s also things to do. There’s a valuable asset that requires regular attention and care—your customer data. Regardless of the season, an annual ‘spring clean’ to maintain the integrity and health of customer data is a very wise investment.

Here’s 5 must-do tasks we recommend you do once a year, to keep your data as fresh as a daisy:

1. Check against NZ Post’s verified Postal Address File (PAF) to validate your data
2. Issue a new Statement of Accuracy to confirm eligibility for NZ Post volume postal discount
3. Data dedupe – to identify and remove any duplicated records throughout
4. Consistent formatting – check for anomalies in data value formats. ie, are there any initials or company names in first name fields, do you have fall backs in place for missing values and are there any missing address fields?
5. NZ Death Register scan

Inaccurate data can turn customer relationships sour and have a detrimental effect on campaign results.

Healthy data will reduce the amount of returned mail, customer enquiry and complaints, and increase response rates and return on investment. The benefits of keeping your data in good shape far outweigh the minimal investment required to achieve it.

If you have any questions about how to maintain healthy data we’d be happy to help out. Contact us here.

Or ask us for a FREE data health check. Our expert data team will analyse your current data, advise what shape it’s in, and (if required) provide recommended action to improve its quality and deliverability.