Do you really know your Customers?

Data segmentation process is about segmenting your data so that it can be used efficiently in marketing and business operations.

After data segmentation, you can use the segmented data to communicate relevant message to each segmented audience. This allows you to use differential marketing strategies to unique customer segments. Segmented data allow you to tailor campaigns based on demographic characteristics, buying and communication preferences and purchase preferences.

Data segmentation allows you to

• Develop new strategies to acquire, retain, and cross-sell customers
• Gain good grasp of activities that drive buying decisions
• Segment and target customers precisely
• Understand customer and prospect base
• Improve customer retention
• Send offers that resonate with your target audience
• Add business intelligence to customer files

Data Check Central delivers in-depth data segmentation through accurate analysis of your data based on your business plans. Data segmentation from DCC allows our clients to execute selective marketing plan.

Find out more on how best we can tailor your data. Contact us today

Email Winner or Loser?

Is your email campaign a winner or a loser?

Every business millions of b2b and b2c emails fly across our digital network, communication, prospecting, interacting with potential customers. But how many of these millions will succeed in this email adventurer.

Before we analyze the email success or failure rate, lets to school once again and learn on how we can use web-analytic too for a short review of your existing email

Landing-page bounce rates

For some reason, visitors who arrive on your landing page from email links immediately leave your page. It would befitting to use the cliché, avoided like a plague.

Such immediate bounces are a cause for concern. Figures from landing page bounces should be analyzed and your landing page page should be under scanner. Dig on the main reason for high abandonment. Tweak changes in the template to reduce web page attrition rates.

Trace Visual Distraction

Very often, visitors wader off from the desired conversion path. They lend to visit pages like career, about us page, privacy policy and then wander away. Such online behavior could be the result of some distraction in your web page. In such cases, try to change the position of links, remove images or graphics in the landing page to connect more visitors to your conversion path.

Discover, Discover new Markets!

How can small business gain knowledge and market information through right market segments?

Answer to this question lies with your data. Data along with required parameters can form the bedrock of your research in customer markets. The following two steps can work to define and understand on your target markets.

Step I

Gain input from quantitative research to assimilate good knowledge of your markets and customers. Research data can be resourced from the following points

• Trade shows, conferences and business publications
• Government research reports or key Industry or biz reports

Step – II

Gather input form the market space.

• Track competitors marketing efforts (online & offline) and emulate them
• Discuss with trade association or groups about your products/services
• Research your target customers (e-surveys, polls, questionnaires)

Aim of this exercise is to divide the markets into niche segments. Such segmentation will allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns to specific markets and in the process, discover new markets.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Clive

What is an Data Audit?

What is an Data Audit?

Data audit involves systematic and independent examination of your data to determine whether your business data are maintained accordance with an organization goal, objective and policies. Data audit is a litmus test for the organization and addresses key issues around improving the quality of data.

The key objective of Data Audit is to ensure that your data is:

• Maintained as per required business rules
• Organized for business use across all departments.
• Stored consistently

Data Check Central's data audit service provides real insight on the quality of your data. Through our proprietary process we report on the accuracy and validity of data. We scan and flag your data to track changes on the following:

• Identify duplicate Records
• Find deceased Individuals records
• Find Gone-Away persons records
• Flags inaccurate postal addresses & Zip Codes
• Flags inconsistent data
• Identify additional data components

Basic Benefits from Auditing

The basic benefits of b2b data audit for organization can be summed in five points. Data audit can:

• Facilitates data storage according to data compliance norms
• Measure and manage customer data
• Find best way to protect data loss
• Improves CRM results with best use of data
• Prioritize resources for efficient storage of business data

Contact us to find more about our fantastic 'data audit' process. Our process and solution are best fit for small biz. We can drastically improve data quality and improve ROI on database marketing. Talk to our representative for more information.

Four Steps To Generate More Email Clicks

Thanks to e-mail, b2b marketers have the option to reach customers across national boundaries in an instant with targeted communication. But this benefit has been robbed by unsolicited email campaigners who has engineered a new word - Spam mails.

Due to these riding issues, and to the technological complexities, today's email marketers face daunting task to reach in-box of prospective customers. Most of the email communication fail to reach the recipient or get waylaid by spam filters. In order to cut across digital traps, email marketer has to use the latest know-how and leading practices in email marketing.

This short four tips detail on the best practices for high quality email campaigns for b2b marketing

Best fit email template - build around 600 Pixels Wide

Most email client set standards and impose some limitation on the width of the email template. Since it varies from email client to other, design Email templates around 600 pixels wide. Next time when your team designs, instruct them to be mindful of this limitation.

Test preview pane rendering issues in popular email clients

2007 Microsoft Outlook came with a host of changes that ripped off the look and feel of email templates. Likewise, most of the major email clients render emails differently. Due to such distortion, diligent email marketers test email in major email clients before they fire the e-epistles

Make Your Email readable with Images Disabled

By default, most email clients disable images. The email newsletters designed in the best fitting color & design can be ripped off by these heartless third-party email clients. Since, this is a fact we have to live with, make your email readable with images disabled.

Send Plain Text along with HTML mails

HTML email enable you to flex your design capabilities and align your message to the exact match of your clients. But many recipients system do not support HTML emails. You can subvert such hiccups, by attaching plan text version along with HTML mail. Another technique to optimize email template is to design HTML email messages within in the rage of 20 to 40 kb.

Customer Life Cycle - Stages

The customer life cycle starts from the prospect stage and passes through the lead conversion pipeline to end as a customer. This each point in the path is given an obvious name.

In a simple way we understand the whole process by dividing into five phases.

Reach:

Initial phase is the attention seeking time. How to woo prospects to be your customer. How to reach prospect through their mode of communication.

Acquisition:

Capturing the prospect with relevant influence. At this stage your communication should touch on the valid interest point of your customer.

Conversion:

At this stage, you'll be establishing a definite relationship with your customer. It's when customer decides to get into biz relationship with you. Buy news in the air!

Retention:

Retaining existing customers is the most rewarding way to create more revenue for your company. Establish good rapport with your current clients and promote new offers. This cross-selling, up-selling in-turn bring more revenue from your customers.

Loyalty:

Customers voice is ten times more valued than your corporate slogans. Your next plan should focus to get more mileage from your existing clients by turning them to your brand ambassador. In order to foster loyalty from customer banks, you should melt preferential offers/discounts etc., to long term loyal customers.

How to influence customers through Online Behavior Segments

Market segmentation based on online behavior allows organizations to group consumers on silos based on their online behavior. Using this information, you can assemble marketing promotions to audience based on their online behavior.

As per the July 2009 b2b marketing survey, 67% of b2b online vendors who tied email campaigns based on the behavioral segments reported 46% increase in response and 23% more conversion.

How?

Marketing to recipients based on their behavioral traits allow marketers to pinpoint offers based on their interest. Moreover, now UK consumers demand customer loyalty schemes based on their online behavior. This tally with the thought that consumers are expecting online marketing to be 'convenience and relevant'.

Behavioral-based segmentation can be based to those recipients: Following are few popular behavioral points used by online marketers:

• who regularly opens your email
• Who have not opened your email for some time
• who have clicked on a specific link/article/offer
• who visits specific pages in your web site
• who purchased a specific product/solution
• Does behavioral segmenting sound daunting?

Even though it involves tracking of users on your website or campaign, it actually follow a systematic approach that vary from business to business.

Each business follows an unique segmenting device that include the following process:

(a) Define relevant segments for categorizing consumers

(b) Define triggers for placing the consumers into the segments

(c) Defining the right content for each defined segment,

(d) Identify a behavior for the consumer visiting the web site

(e) Categorize consumers into a segments based on interests

(g) Reassign consumers based on consumer behavior in selecting content, or links clicked on the web site.

Conclusion

The most important focus for behavioral segmenting is to understand the behavior aspect of the online visitors. Determine their entry point, hot zones and determines their exit touch points across multiple channels.

As we are approach 2009 holiday season, its the season to rhyme online promotion to the right to reach most receptive customer.

Delivery Point Validation

Delivery Point Validation (DPV) service verifies postal data file with the current USPS postal files and thereby standardize postal address for accurate mailing. DPV checks process is made to see if specific street address is deliverable.

This process verifies addresses, in real-time or does batch processes. During DPV process, the address is matched against the USPS’s database of 150 million addresses. DPV processing yields a “yes” or “no” confirmation on USPS address validity.

Benefits of Delivery Point Validation process

The benefits of enhancing data using DPV process can be measured in accurate mailing and eliminate undelivered emails. DPV process ensures error free postal addresses and restores your confidence in your postal data file.

# Verify existence of actual address

# Increase savings in postage and production

# Reduce undeliverable mails

# Convert rural style addresses to city style addresses

After DPV, address is corrected, and standardized to USPS specifications. Each address is appended with ZIP+4 code to ensure accurate mailing.

Delivery point validation service from Data Check Central has appended intelligent mail strategies to many high-volume mail handlers and save thousands of dollars in postal communication. We introduced DPV process in 2008, since then it has been utilized by over 1,500 businesses in Industry verticals like utilities, retail, financial services, banking, telecommunications, insurance, and other b2b business.

DPV Service From DCC
Data Check Central, subsidiary of industry-leading database maintenance service provider "Data Central" offers best-in-class DPV service at competitive price. Our experience with a wide variety of Industry, small business enables our managers to offer a fresh look at your data and to suggest a new perceptive on your data.

Ready to get started? Request here for more information. Complete our online form for immediate callback or appointment.

How Consumer Data Builds Preference

Do you treat all customers alike?

One gravest mistake frequently occurring in CRM technology is the failure to adopt selective treatment of customers. It's widely understood in marketing circles that “no two customer is created equal”.

Knowing customers, more impotantly, profitable customer is right way to gain best value from Customer Relationship Management. It's not about the number of “fields” in your customer database, but how you're able to unearth quality information about your customers by looking from the collected data. Data collected from numerous customer interaction can be the right place to look for some common traits, taste, preferences etc.

How to identify profitable customer segments and target messages to them?

Marketing is always under a state of flux. Sales tactics that worked last year, may not work this year. In the era of heated competition and shirking customer pools, it's important to target messages to select customer segments.

Marketing goal is to learn as much as you can about your customers and develop your specific marketing programs so they they can match with customers need. Prime reason for differential treatment is that customers have different needs.

SMBs should collate, identify profitable customers and find customers' concerns before sending specific marketing campaigns. Change in time would alter the challenges and bring new concerns about marketing.


Redefine Your Customers understanding – Question time


• What are the immediate challenges that concern customers?

Can your solution offer something to mitigate those concerns. Can you provide value-aded services or serve better guarantees to your products/solutions

• How are customers facing the slump in their business as a result of down economy?

Identify how your product help them weather the ravages of current economy.

• Are they willing to buy your product/services in smaller increments

Offer test programs or provide your customers with phased purchasing

• How can you resolve the customers concern about your products/services?

Formulate new programs to show how they gain more value from current customers, and provide support services to enhance their experience f

In Summary:

Right interpretation of customer data can help businesses learn which customers produce the most profit, not just the most revenue. Quality data in CRM help you to analyze customers buying patterns, and help you to identify potential high-value customers. In the end, meanigful data in CRM tool can help maximize ROI from targeted marketing and reduce the cost of sales.

Data Consistency Checks for SEMs

Does inconsistent data in your database marketing pull down the profits?

Lack of data consistency, in quality creates a host of problems for your organization. Inconsistent customer data cause difficulty in business communication and reduce the output of your sales team.

For marketing, it undermines efforts in targeted communication, messaging, and branding.

Data Check Central helps companies with data management solution meant to improve the representation of customer data.

With Data Check Central, you can leave the hassles of data quality and work on business development front. Quality data can enable your sales team to communicate efficiently with prospects. Our team will support your in-house resources to advance key knowledge points about your customers & support b2b marketing initiatives.

Our data solution can create high value data that are:

1. Compliant and consistent
2. Accurate with an impact
3. Specifically target profitable segments

Discover Data Check Central

Get quality data in your database without spending heavy investment on data solutions. Sign-in your requirement/details or speak with one of our data enablement experts today!

Data Cleansing - Thanksgiving '09 offer

Data Check central releases special offer "Thanksgiving '09 offer' to our customers. “We are pleased to once again offer our customers and exceptional data value this Thanksgiving for data appending and data cleansing service".

Get more value from your customer data and transform customer data into a gold mine. We understand today's business challenges and come with a new way to correct your data and give you freedom from bad logs in your data (i.e. incomplete, duplicate, missing, inconsistent, out-of-date, incorrectly formatted)

Our current offer is not just about cleansing, but we bring value across the enterprise through transfer-of-knowledge and by establishing best data practices. Our new '09 Thanksgiving offer encompass best value from these data services:

• Remove spelling mistakes and inconsistent abbreviations
• Identify and remove duplicate records
• Identify erroneous records
• Delete erroneous/foreign characters
• Update missing data details e.g., postcodes, titles, prefix
• Correct ZIP+4 and Carrier Route Codes
• Standardize data as per your business rules
• Remove unnecessary spaces
• Place data in the right field
• Establish right case
• Quality check on telephone and cellphone numbers

Features:

Enhance Customers' Experience
Coddle your data, treat them as they are the most important asset of your business. Good data begets happy customers, and your customers will grow your business for you.

Provide targeted, differentiated customer service
Make the best use of economic slowdown, by treating high-value customers with the best services and value. Refine your data to segment your data as per customer preferences. Make your best customer stay loyal and do not let them defect to the competition.

Improve Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Efforts
Reps sell what they know. Refurbish your data to provide single view of the customer. Table more information for your salespeople. Arm your sales team to the teeth with improved customer knowledge.

Streamline Customer Relationship Management
Execute a systematic approach to manage your data before they are fed to CRM initiatives.

As we close in the busiest holiday season, Data Check Central, Inc., is offering customers with an additional reason to clean your customer database. With a compelling new lineup of data services, we can work out the best rates for data improvement.

Call now or sign-up your details for special pricing for data appending service and data merging.

Top causes of duplicate records

Duplicate records in your customer data field results in duplicate campaigning. Duplicate customer records in your marketing database results in bad customer experience, and reduce marketing efficiency. Moreover, duplicate records in CRM system can distort the projections, results in reduced of your heavy investment

Common causes of duplicate records include:

Poor data-entry procedures
Inconsistent data entry, inadequate verification, poor data entry service level agreements can make way for duplicate records in your customer file. Four out of ten SMBs surveyed, reported that the root flow of duplicate business records are through poor data-input procedure.

Inconsistent formatting & abbreviations
Even if checked, a differently formatted name may not be found or recognized as a duplicate. Eg: "Doctor William Godwin" may not be recognized if he also exists as "Dr William Godwin".

Change of addresses
The same person may appear to not exist in the database if they have since changed their address.

Poor data integration
Different systems, or different data format used in various system can result in duplicate entries in an organization. Inconsistent data integrity rules within systems like mainframe applications, CRM applications, flat files, spreadsheets and smaller databases like MS Access used by departments can spawn duplicate version of the same customer.

Poor data validation
Poor modeling techniques and the failure to impose business rules to catch data input errors can let unscrupulous or duplicate data in your system.

For example, when City, State and ZipCode fields are not validated – then it can result in many duplicate records.

List Merging
Data merged from multiple data set and made into one super-set can result in different version of the same record. In spite of all the procedures, checks and validations, data merging process continue to plague the new data with multiple data variants.

Company merging and acquisitions

When data from two organizations are merged, the new data can hold two versions of the same customer record. Heterogeneous processes and systems used by SMBs to maintain customer records can funnel in new avatar of the same customer.

Prospect list purchases
List purchased or imported from third party vendors can bring in fresh set of prospect data. But, along with the new wealth, it can also bring in duplicate records of customers that existing in your system.

Systems Integration

Often multiple systems need to talk with each other – for example, perhaps your Financials system needs to talk to your Ordering and Quoting system which in turn needs to talk to your Customer Relationship Management system.

In-flow from multiple customer channel

Customer details entered through different channels (web site telephone, phone etc.) can result in different account of the same customer.

One world - one view of the customer

Single, comprehensive view of your customers is the key for maximizing customer relationship and induce higher performance from customer relationship management.

Enhance your customer data with Telephone append

One way to reclaim active phone numbers of your business file is through business phone append. Through DCC's business phone append service, we can replace the missing phone numbers or update new phone numbers on older lists.

Data Check Central provides business phone appending to SMEs by using our master database that contains phone records of more than 90 million business concerns. Our detailed records can even reach multiple contacts in the same company, thereby enabling you to market effectively. In order to provide accurate records, we review our records using NCOA processing.

How do we acquire business Phone data:

We maintain and gather accurate data through multiple sources. Each record entering our data center is tele-verified for authenticity. Here's the main resouces through which we acquire businesss data in our master data file:

• Reputed data vendors
  
• Yellow page directories
• Business telephone directories
• Business Annual reports
• Trade shows and business conferences
• National, State, Industry, and City directories
• Govt reports, business directories & Journals

Why telephone number appending

Telephone number of your business contacts are very essential for day-to-business activities and for business marketing. But, due to changes in phone numbers or due to wrong listing , the phone records in your "phone field" becomes useless. Incorrect phone numbers in your business database brings down the quality of telemarketing and brings loss of revenue to your business.

For business, where data run to millions, the task of updating or verifying records can be daunting and involves heavy expenditure. Due to this heavy investment in telephone number process, many small biz marketers detest from full house phone appending. This laxity slowly accumulate dead phone numbers in your repository and erodes the value of your data.

How accurate phone number benefit your business

• Expand tele-marketing opportunities for your business
• Gain more business through active communication
• Faster and more effective use of resources
• Add revenue opportunities from your current database
  
  

Data Check Central's telephone # appending

Take advantage of our low-cost, fast, global telephone appending service. Our service is best suited for medium to small business which can get personalized appending service at affordable cost. We also provide custom phone list segmented by city, area code & carrier.

Our customized phone appending can suit any business model or any Industry by making custom-fit phone appending solution. Our automated phone append software also flags any record that appears on any State, or Federal Do Not Call list.

DCC's Telephone Appending service now provides FREE data quality audit. This limited period offer is given on first-come basis. Register now for a no obligation data check.

Firmographic Data Enhancement

Supplement your business data with right details

In business-to-business markets, firmographic enhancement add valuable details to your business record. This input boost the quality of existing database with data elements, such as SIC codes, contact name, title, telephone number, number of employees, sales, etc.

Appending firmographic data - Target your prospect

In business markets, the aim of firmographic segmentation is to build groups like high value groups, traits, and customer preferences. These data clusters can be analysed to understand the purpose of purchase, and divide the market into like-minded buyer groups. Further, this new data wealth, such as purchase trigger elements can help you get a competitive edge in the market space.

Firmographic Business variables include:

• Industry (SIC or NAIC) code
• Contact Name
• Online - offline biz
• Job function
• Phone number
• Title
• Employee size
• Sales Volume
• Company Size
• Financial and Business metrics
• and more...

Data Check Central delivers verified business information obtained from our partners and data agents. Our repository holds more than 120 million records that covers leading industries and major markets across (U.S, Canada , U.K, Singapore and Australia). Moreover, we scrub our business data to maintain high-delivery quality score.

Firmographic data append

Our one-of-the-kind append process use our master data to match with your customer data. Our tool flags similar records and updates firmographic information to your record. From the new data, you can group customers with similar business traits and set new marketing strategies for each of the segment.

What can a company do with this firmographic data?

• Seed new business avenues
• Uncover niche markets
• Identify target segments
• Access competitive opportunity
• Increase customer satisfaction

Data Check Central's firmographic append services can be used to tailor audience-specific marketing programs. Once you have new data, you can develop new strategies using product/service, price, promotion to find new to markets.

For more details on firmographic append, fill in the online form below. Contact us to avail FREE firmographic data for your biz.

Gain Value from Data Scrubbing

Low quality marketing list begets complaints and backlashes your online reputation. Email marketers dread such repurcursion, and to avoid it, marketers dole a bit part of database budget to maintain healthy customer records.

Bad prospect data lower email delivery, create more hard bounces. Moreover, ISP's are know to track the percent of "unknown users' and "spam traps" received from your campaign . When you consider such marketing portholes, it's advisable to filter the email addresses for any malacious 'honey pots' or bad email addresses.

Data scrubbing is the best remedy available to email marketers. This process can virtually eliminate bad address from the database and keep your database healthy.

Let's uncover the benefits of data scrubing exercise.

• Eliminate spam trap email address
• Eliminate illegal domains
• Increase email delivery
• Decrease undeliverable emails
• Suppress troublesome records

Now stop loosing customers. Replace useless data that can create havoc to your mail servers and attract unwanted attention from ISP's.

Are you losing customers from your datafile?
Data Check Central currently provides best-in-class data protection for many small to medium business in U.S and U.K. Our in-house software uses refined algorithms to standardize, correct, match, the input data. Apart from the automated data check, our data analysts personally work on customer data to scrub of all bad elements. Clean data, gives you superior edge in e-marketing and drive high quality visitors to your website.

Data Check central brings cutting-edge data management solution with innovative solutions, software, outsourcing and consulting.We know data mangement, we know what data works, and we understand what is expected.

Contact us now to know how we can help you reap more RESULTS from our custom-made data solution.