To what extent is your business losing out, because of poor data quality?

Research by Black Tiger Belgium shows that, on average, a Belgian company is unable to reach 6.75% of their active customers because of poor data, causing them to miss out on 6.75% of direct campaign driven revenue.

Your customer data, your biggest asset…and source of loss and risk

All businesses are driven by customer data. It’s your biggest asset.

So, can you imagine how much business you lose or put at risk, just by having poor data?  International studies show that companies lose an average of 20% in revenue because of poor data quality. Because it’s not about the data, or the campaign performance, it’s about real people. Your customers.

And on top of that, if you are not rigorous with data quality, you are probably not compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A good reason why top management has a very large interest in creating a good data culture.

The many faces of bad data quality

Poor data quality comes in many forms: incompleteness, inconsistency, … and inaccuracy. Let’s just focus on the latter, here.

When you are a direct mailer, inaccuracy of your postal addresses – poor address input, movers – has a large impact on both your mailing ROI and on your campaign revenue.

But how large?

Black Tiger Belgium, the personal data expert company, conducted quality audits on multiple consumer databases, between mid 2019 and mid 2021, across various industries, between mid 2019 and mid 2021, We identified the number of inaccurate postal addresses, indicating the number of customers the advertisers in the study would no longer be able to reach via postal mailing.  Poor address quality mainly results from bad input (see here how to remedy this) and movers.

Movers in Belgium

Every year, around 10% of Belgian families move house. In the age group between 25 and 35 years, this even increases to 25%. So, if your customer base consists of a majority of young families, after five years you will have lost all (non-digital) contact with them. Unless you regularly update your file.

Looking at the total customer databases :

• 13% of addresses in the sample was inaccurate.

When narrowing down on addresses that were actively mailed by the advertisers in the study :

• we found 6.75% bad addresses

These are the most valuable customers, bringing the most revenue. So not being able to reach those customers adds up to at least 6.75% in campaign revenue loss! And then we’re not even counting the impact on campaign costs.

Fluctations are to be observed, depending on the industries :

And what about you?