Database Marketing: Data cleansing software and the customer data management toolkit

Marketing has long had a need to clean and verify customer names and addresses, often in order to support prospect acquisition work. A host of specialised apps have grown up that specialise in postcode verification, updating, deduping, suppression, data manipulation/transformation and other tasks. A particular strength is in the complex and error-prone task of name and address record matching.

These applications support the work of bureaux and internal departments that need to update postcodes and weed out duplicates within the customer base, or to merge together tens or even hundreds of bought-in third party prospect lists. There are also more specialised apps, for example, to import data from web page forms in the correct postcoded format. Apps range in sophistication from simple rapid address entry up to complex ones like helpIT and Cygnus.

But there is more and more focus on keeping data clean across the whole business. The IT department tends to be more focused on transactional order processing databases and so on rather than putting together extracts for marketing's needs. Could the specialist marketing tools be just what the IT department is looking for?

So are the marketing-specific tools moving into a wider corporate application? Are they breaking out of their niche in bureaux and marketing depts? And who is using them? Who else might benefit from them?

Or will they continue to be very much marketing-specific tools? For example, the smaller postcoding ones below are used to bolt onto websites, call centres etc - useful but a different order of sophistication?

Database Marketing magazine brings together the latest news, case studies and feature articles on UK target marketing and customer management for a sophisticated audience of managers and users in the marketing, sales and service functions.

Deadline for leads is 20th July 2006. Email me or leave a comment below.