The quality of data used in personalisation

With the recent changes in the ISPs and email providers’ email acceptance policies many marketers stress the ever increasing importance of deliverability. Surely, deliverability is one of the things that would enjoy much attention in 2008, but getting an email into an inbox is only half the job done (same goes for direct mail). What happens when an email or a mail piece is opened?

Usually, one of the first and most important things that stand out right from the start are salutations and addressing, so it would make perfect sense to get this one right. After all, this is what the recipient sees almost immediately and it makes a big impact on whether the rest of the message will be read or it will meet the bin.

So, what’s the best way to get it right? While there are no 100% error proof rules, following some guidelines can dramatically the quality of the data used in personalisation, otherwise you will end up with gems like:

Mr. 12345
BOB
jAMES

and others.

It is worth mentioning that more than two thirds of data errors can be corrected during data capture. Since the overwhelming majority of the data collected now is done through the web interface, it makes sense paying more attention to the quality of submission forms. The problem of bad data input on them can be rectified mostly by imposing field validation criteria (much like it is done for email) and, to take it further, automatic field formatting based on the field content.