Understanding Site Impact’s Data September 17, 2019, | Posted by erin

At Site Impact, we’ve made no secret of the fact that one of our key factors for success is data. Email marketing in general thrives on data; especially as consumers demand more and more personalization and more relevant offers, brands and marketers need data to target the right audience, and get the right message to them. But we’ve gotten a lot of questions about our own data: how we gather it, organize it, and ensure the quality that our clients expect from us. By taking care of our data, we help our partners take their email campaigns to the next level--so today we’re going to explain a bit of what makes Site Impact’s data unique.

Start with consent

One of the major tenets of our data program is the fact that we strictly adhere to consent-based marketing principles. Every piece of data we have is provided to us through a double opt-in form that provides consent to receive third party offers. We require both an email address and a postal code in our form--and we get confirmation from people who sign up that they do want to receive offers. This is a crucial step that some email marketing agencies seem to ignore for the sake of having larger pools of data; it means that there are fewer spam reports, which leads to lower bounce rates--which inherently means a higher conversion rate.

Hygiene is supreme

Data hygiene refers to the measures that are taken to ensure that data is good and valid, and Site Impact is serious about this too. Our data is regularly cleansed to make sure that there are no junk emails on the list, no typo addresses included, and even more. We go through the data we collect constantly to make sure that the things that lead to being marked as spam don’t come up--and we take data hygiene a step further when it comes to ongoing use of the data we collect. It’s incredibly important to make sure that your data is good when you collect it, because if--even by accident--you send frequently to addresses that are invalid, or addresses belonging to people that didn’t actually opt in, or other related issues come up, the email platforms (Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, Google’s Gmail) will consider you spam. And once you lose a good reputation, it’s hard to get it back.

Verification expands our data

We mentioned that we have a postal code requirement in our opt-in form. This allows us to verify data and also to use postal data to gather more data points on people who sign up to receive third party offers from us. Postal overlay allows us to use various sources to enrich our data to help determine available targeting options. It also allows us to cross-reference data with USPS to update physical addresses as our recipients move. Our data is CASS validated and NCOA certified, so it’s up to date and our clients can be sure that it will give them the results they need.

When it comes to email marketing, data is a major lynchpin of success. That is why Site Impact takes our data collection and maintenance so seriously: the quality of our data can bring our clients’ campaigns to the next level, but only if that quality is high. Now that you know a little more about how we collect and handle our data, contact us to learn more about what we can do with it for your campaigns.