Data Services

 

Maintenance of a database, be this for customers, prospects or members, can be a very time consuming and labour intensive process. Cognitum can relieve you of this worry and, through our extensive range of bureau services, clean up your data professionally and efficiently. 

 

Our bespoke services are not cheap but believe us when we say you get what you pay for in this business!  Use our enquiry form for a fast job estimate and/or our free data health check.

 

If you are not sure what you need of us then try our twelve tough questions or read through the service descriptions below

  

Database management

Finding your database too big to manage properly in house?  Getting to the point where you need to employ a DBA but can’t justify it because you can’t show how the position relates directly to revenue generation?  Perhaps you should consider outsourcing this side of your database management to Cognitum.  We have a spotless track record in looking after client databases and are happy to provide client references to back up this claim.  We are registered and fully compliant with current Data Protection Act legislation so you can be sure of your data security and integrity when placing it with us.  We have a sensible charging structure based on work carried out because we believe you shouldn’t be ripped off for using you own data when you need it.

 

Data consolidation

Numerous organisations have come to us with many different data sources or lists to be consolidated into one database, eg for a new system implementation and through mergers/acquisitions. Obviously, some data is felt to be of more importance or more accurate than others and so, at Cognitum, we have developed a strategy to deal with this eventuality. We are able to take up to fifty files simultaneously and de-duplicate them against each other at which point they can be merged into one master file or returned as original files. At the same time the files may be suppressed against any other files (eg Mailing Preference Service, Mortality files or customer files) to produce 'clean' data sets. The order in which these files are merged and the priority that records have over each other is completely flexible depending on your requirements.

 

B to B addressing

Business-to-business addresses are not easy to look after compared to consumer data.  At present, applying the PAF file to your business customer data will not help a great deal.  Sadly, many proprietary customer database systems have woefully inadequate address field structures when it comes to the ongoing management of business address data.  Cognitum has many years experience in working with business data and can apply our accumulated knowledge and expertise to sorting out your database.  We can work with flat file structures where the same company exists many times against different contact names. We can also work with parent/child relationships where many contacts should be attached to one master organisation record.  If you are thinking about improving your data, try our free data healthcheck.

 

International address formatting

If you have international customers then you probably have a muddle of formats, spellings and abbreviations. We specialise in tidying up your international data so you benefit from presenting a better image to your customers, eliminating duplicates and substantially reducing non-deliverables.  For international addresses we can offer automatic postcoding for those countries where a PAF type file exists (at a cost effective price).  We can also manipulate the data to put any 'buried' postcodes into the correct field as well as ensuring the address format meets local postal requirements.

 

Data cleaning/De-duplication

At first sight the simplest of operations and there numerous suppliers who offer this service. However, most of these suppliers will use automatic routines and stop there.  Cognitum use such routines, including an exclusive suite of routines we have developed over time.  But we do not stop there!  Once the data is as clean as it can be using the tools at our disposal, we then subject it to a rigorous set of manual checks – yes, real people using their brains and experience to hand finish your data.  Not a cheap thing to do but an up front investment which will save you money in the long run.  Liken it to paying £5 to put your car through the supermarket carwash to paying £8 to have someone, who loves and respects cars, hand wash and polish it...

 

Data merge and purge

Naturally, you want to identify and remove duplicate names and addresses from your database. You may also want to merge various data sources together to ensure you are not paying list suppliers for contacts you already have on your database. Cognitum offer a breadth of experience in de-duplicating both international and UK data and specialise in sorting out those difficult duplicates at the organisational/company level where your database has a complex set of parent/child relationships. 

 

Suppression processing

An area where investment will reduce your direct marketing costs and avoid the potential for creating a bad impression with your customers.  Cognitum can apply a range of industry recommended suppression files to your data on a regular basis or just prior to large campaigns, whichever suits you best.  These routinely include Gone Aways, Bereavement, Do Not Mail/Fax/Telephone and any other specific suppression criteria you specify.

 

Lifestyle enhancement

There are numerous commercially available lifestyle data files that you can draw upon to enrich your own consumer or business records.  However, they all provide different variables at a vast range of prices.  We can help you identify what additional data will make a significant difference to your marketing communications and provide you with an evaluation of potential suppliers of that data set.  If required, we can act as an intermediary to merge your data with the additional data outside your system so you avoid any potential database downtime.

  

Postcode validation

Our basic service can allocate correct postcodes and correct and verify existing addresses. For those difficult addresses we also offer a bespoke manual postcoding service.

 

Analysis and profiling

How much useful information do you really get from your weekly and monthly sales/marketing reports?  Can you spot trends or aberrations quickly enough to take remedial action?  Cognitum can help you by profiling your raw data (by geography, size of customer etc) and attach segmentation flags that can then be exported to a variety of common desktop packages for simple production of graphical reports so you can see what’s going on at a glance.  We can also amalgamate response data from different campaigns and produce cross-tab reports that can prove very powerful in identifying niche sectors that may otherwise go unnoticed.

 

Targeting

Many organisations have a disconnect between their sales data and their marketing data that makes it virtually impossible to accurately target campaigns.  One solution is to go the integrated CRM route but this is not going to suit everybody.  Cognitum can provide an alternative as either a short-term solution or an ongoing service by amalgamating sales and marketing data on our own system (fully compliant under the Data Protection Act) and supplying client specified reports.  Results-based selection flags can then be added back onto the data for future campaigns.

 

Creation of variable data files for digital printing

The natural follow on from profiling and targeting – once you have segmented your audience, you want the ability to deliver specific messages based on that segmentation.  We can create the files you need to create numerous personalised variations of, say, a sales letter within the same print run – and we can print it for you too. See Marketing & Fulfillment