This two-part blog series addresses the similarities between cleaning your dirty laundry and instituting a master data quality strategy.
How often do I need to do my laundry?
Data Cleansing & Validation Frequency
In many cases, one can look at your laundry (or just smell them)and provide you with all the input you need to make a judgment call regarding frequency of cleansing required. This is pretty straightforward, but with your data there are numerous factors you need to consider.
- How frequently is transactional and promotional data available for updates?
- How frequently are 3rd party source files used for validation updated?
- How does data cleansing and validation impact your marketing campaigns?
- How does data cleansing and validation impact your modeling, analytics, response analysis and reporting?
The old adage “garbage in, garbage out”, which many of us learned years ago in school still holds true today, if not more so with the proliferation of data sources marketers have access to. Marketers need to develop a cleansing and validation routine and stick to it in order to avoid corruption of their data.
Name and Address Data – Direct mail requirements call for name and address data to be updated every 90 days. The primary source of this data is updated weekly so many marketers choose to update on a more frequent basis such as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to coincide with marketing campaigns, or scheduled database updates.
Transactional and Promotional Data – This data which drives analytics, response analysis, financial reporting, etc. should be validated, standardized, linked and aggregated, as frequently as possible. Many marketers, such as retailers, choose to do this on a daily basis.
Appended / Enhanced Data – The frequency of 3rd party source data updates vary from daily up to quarterly. . Many data quality service providers recommend updates be applied as they become available to maintain the accuracy and to keep elements actionable.
These are just a few of the data points typically maintained by marketers as part of their data quality initiatives. When considering all options available to you, a combination of data cleansing timelines (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) should be utilized to ensure clean, actionable data that will allow you to provide better multi-channel customer experiences.
