Building and maintaining a business-to-business house file can be daunting. The task is compounded when a company has many different databases with no common link, making it impossible to exchange information among departments.
The issue grows in scope and complexity when customer and prospect information that’s added to the file provides several company names for the same enterprise. Abbreviations and company-name permutations create duplicate records on virtually every file. And this matter can get worse still because people who change jobs or companies rarely file a change of address with the U.S. Postal Service and are not identified in the National Change of Address (NCOA) database. Further complications are caused by changes due to corporate mergers and takeovers and business closures.
B-to-B marketers have always lived with this problem because there was no realistic approach to cleaning and maintaining their databases.
What to Do
For starters, send all house files to a service bureau and have them combined into one database. Historically this produces about 50% to 60% match rates.
Once you’ve built a merged, consolidated database, process the file through NCOA. As you identify incorrect names, build a suppression file of names that shouldn’t be mailed. This file will grow in size and value. When you rent names from outside lists or merge additional files with your house file, you can bounce the records against the suppression file and eliminate bad names and addresses before you ever mail.
Today’s technically oriented business environment causes a common mistake in many companies. All too often a firm will verify a customer or prospect’s mailing address during a phone conversation and change the address information during the call. So the old address is changed, but the company misses a chance to move the old, bad address to the suppression file. It could end up being a costly oversight.
The USPS NCOA files maintain information for three years. If your company has older records as part of its house file (and what firm doesn’t?) they likely will not be identified using the NCOA database.
One Company’s Experience
Direct Marketing Publishers recently discovered that if it sent mailings to older records
Network
