Question

Topic: Strategy

Value In Keeping Old Customer Data In Database

Posted by kayla on 12/30/2011 at 2:54 PM ET 125 Points
I recently did a mailer via first class mail and got a bunch of returned mailers. We are a B2B company and wanted to clean out our database of people and addresses that are no longer with companies we have done business with in the past (up to 5 years ago). Now we need to figure out what to do with the contact information of those individuals that had returned mailers. Do we export them out of our CRM (our customer database) or keep them in the CRM but note them as "inactive"

I basically need to know the value in keeping outdated, inaccurate data in the CRM/database.

Thank you!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by modza on 12/30/2011 at 3:23 PM Accepted
    I maintained a customer database at more than one company, and found it much better to purge. You've got enough trouble getting responses from the people whose addresses are current to worry about the ones you've lost.

    If you had an intern and think those people are really good prospects wherever they landed, you could use jigsaw, linkedin, plaxo and other more or less current contact services to track (some of) them down, but between retirements, layoffs, changes of career and deaths, especially over such a long period of time, it's not worth spending money on.

    Our rule of thumb was that any address over six months old was suspect, and we only spent the money on first-class mailings once a year, just for the purge value.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 12/31/2011 at 12:22 PM Accepted
    Consider removing the dead names from your active list but hang on to them and see if it's worth spending time on updating them in some way—perhaps via e-mail if you have e-mail addresses.

    When people move, their mailing addresses change but their e-mail addresses tend to remain the same. From this you might be able to salvage a portion of your list and have people update their information via some kind of value-driven offer addressed to their immediate sense of self interest.
  • Posted by louisebullimore on 1/16/2012 at 7:07 PM Member
    Before you permanently delete the records, it might be advisable to run a check to see if any of them were high spending customers. (picking your threshold like stlubahn advises) You can then be selective about which you keep, and try to update them - and which you delete (because they were never particularly good customers anyway)
    If, for example, a returned mailing was from a high spending customer who's last transaction was in the previous 3-6 months, then it would be well worth the time effort of finding the company or individual's new address (or finding out if they have gone out of business)

    An alternative to deleting redundant records, would be to put a suppression flag on them. The record could then be updated if the new contact details are found at a later date, and the transaction history for this company would remain intact.

    If you buy in data from third parties, you could also use your suppression list to deduplicate against. No point in deleting your own out of date data - and then buying it in again from someone else!
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