On Monday 27th April, data processing and management company UK Changes went into administration. The independent company is one of the key players in the UK data processing industry.
In the current climate it’s more vital than ever that marketers keep their data quality high. Last year, a global study by Forrester Consulting found that 21% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor-quality data, leading to a loss of 30% of customers on average, the same study reveals.
That translates to a £9.7 million ($12 million dollars) to £13.3 million ($16.5 million dollars) average annual loss for the midsize and enterprise companies that participated in the Forrester study.
The handling of consumer data has changed hugely in the last two years, due to GDPR and seen the decline of businesses who sell and manage data disappearing from the market.
Edit works with global clients on improving their data management and data cleansing every day. Reflecting on how the industry climate is evolving for those in the data management field, Matthew Cann, Campaign Delivery Director at Edit, notes that when GDPR was introduced in May 2018, the use of large marketing datasets to produce substantial acquisition campaigns became a thing of the past.
This, together with the surge in digital marketing, dealt a devasting blow to the traditional data bureau – no longer were there large volumes of data to process and cleanse.
Matthew says routines have become more focused on customer retention and reactivation over new prospects. Which is important as it changes how data is processed. The speed of cleansing data into a CRM programme has become a primary focus for those in marketing, as out-of-date data impacts and negatively affects the success of many direct marketing campaigns.
Matthew says accuracy of data has also become more important. He says: “When identifying things like home movers or people that have passed away, we need to be sure the data is correct. We’ve always believed that data services need to be adaptable to new technologies and support a business’ embedded technology to ensure companies can still integrate systems with fresh data.”
