Comments on: Are you de-duping your lists? https://effectivedatabase.com/are-you-de-duping-your-lists/ Making data management a revenue generator Tue, 28 Apr 2020 19:42:47 +0000 hourly 1 By: Wes Trochlil https://effectivedatabase.com/are-you-de-duping-your-lists/#comment-1123 Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:59:19 +0000 http://effectivedatabase.com/blog/?p=1028#comment-1123 Agreed, each organization needs to weight the ROI on de-duping lists.
Success, not perfection.

But in this particular example, de-duping would have been incredibly easy and relatively inexpensive. To add insult to injury, I received a FOURTH solicitation two days after these three arrived!

]]>
By: David M. Patt, CAE https://effectivedatabase.com/are-you-de-duping-your-lists/#comment-1122 Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:15:05 +0000 http://effectivedatabase.com/blog/?p=1028#comment-1122 I worked for an association that merged event registrants from other organizations into its database. Most of those folks were non-members whom we only mailed to once each year.

Quite a few used different variations of their names when registering for each event – e.g. Janet, Jane, Janie. And many of them moved frequently, so the computer could not tell if they were duplicates.

A lot of names remained following a list purge and we had to view those manually and individually. Still, we could not always determine if they were dups.

And it really wasn’t worth the time and money to get rid of them all. In many zip codes, in fact, a non-member who received a piece addressed to someone else may have been just as likely to sign up for an event as the person to whom the mail was intended.

So, some of your members may think you don’t look organized by sending duplicate mailings. But it’s not always cost effective to purge the list.

]]>