The Business Benefits Of Deduplication

Nearly all information lists contain duplicate data, mostly caused by input errors, misspellings, nicknames, abbreviations, and transpositions. For businesses that rely on direct marketing, the result is inaccurate reporting, excess mailing costs, scrap and re-work, inefficient use of resources, and real potential for damaging brand image. This whitepaper from DQ Global explains what deduplication is, why duplicate records undermine customer-centric systems, and how resolving them protects your marketing and corporate budget.

What Deduplication Actually Means

Deduplication is the set of processes that link, match, and merge data to integrate or create a single view of information for an individual. Reliable, integrated and accurate data is imperative for successful direct marketing campaigns, yet innovative campaigns are routinely devalued by duplicate data.

The Real Cost of Duplicate Data

The paper draws on industry research to quantify the problem:

• In 2005, the Direct Mail Information Service found £973.33m was spent on postage and £1,398m on direct mail production
• Research by Marketing Direct magazine indicates direct marketers waste £195m in postage costs on incorrectly addressed international mail
• A QAS survey of over 100 direct mail practitioners found 37 percent of companies still have no data quality strategy in place
• The same survey found 28 percent of direct marketers admit their company rarely cleans its data, or in some cases not at all

Duplicate records challenge all customer-centric information systems, and they are even more problematic for systems that integrate information into a single customer view or data warehouse. Failure to resolve duplicate data compromises the quality, credibility, and usability of integrated information systems, setting businesses up to make very bad decisions with a high degree of certainty.

What Deduplication Delivers

Linking disparate data sources and identifying duplicates delivers fast and accurate database and mailing list correction, and also:

• Avoids the waste caused by duplicate mailings
• Saves time and money
• Ensures a single customer view and a single version of the truth
• Delivers accurate information for better informed decision making

Corporate data is a key business asset and, like all assets, it must be correctly managed and maintained to retain its full value. DQ Global's database-independent software lets users group, flag, merge and purge, and re-assign linked data without the error-prone export and re-import process.

This whitepaper is essential reading for direct marketers, CRM and database managers, and anyone responsible for customer data, whether you work with 1,000 records or many millions. Download it to understand the true cost of duplicates and how deduplication turns your data into a trusted asset.