Data cleansing/list cleansing
Email verification service
Email appending service
Fully GDPR-compliant
Focus on quality not quantity
24-48hr standard turnaround
Home » Data Enhancement

There’s real value in your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases…

…and the leads you can generate and the sales you can make with this important information justifies investing in data enhancement.

Regular data quality enhancement ensures that your sales, marketing, and customer services teams are able to stay in touch with your company’s existing and potential customers.

Your business’s ability to continue to make sales to new clients and to existing clients depends on your people having access to reliable, accurate, GDPR-compliant data.

Bad data is a big problem

And it’s not just because bad data prevents contact and no meaningful contact with existing and potential customers results in fewer sales.

Bad data prevents growth. On your bought-in databases and your prospect databases, it becomes harder for your sales and marketing professionals to contact potential clients and to build a relationship with them.

For any business, constantly finding new customers is a matter of business survival.

That’s because too few companies extract maximum value from their customer databases. If companies spent the same amount of time and effort marketing to their existing customers as they did finding new customers, profitability would soar.

Did you know that email marketing to your existing clients, lapsed clients, and prospects can be responsible for generating more than 30% of a company’s online revenues? Sending just one email newsletter a month could make that much difference – ask us about our customer data enhancement service and on the most effective ways to stay in touch with your clients.

Data enhancement is business enhancement

With our marketing data augmentation and enhancement service, we can refresh and renew the databases your sales, marketing, and customer services teams rely on.

And it’s not just making sure that they have fresh email addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers to work with.

With access to over 3,300,000 decision makers within businesses, schools, and the public sector (650,000 of whom we have email addresses for), we can fill in the gaps on your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases. You’ll have new ways to contact the people with the budgets working for companies and organisations with the greatest need for your products and services.

We can also add substantial extra vital marketing information to your record too from a company’s line of business and turnover, a school’s pupil roll size and dozens of other characteristics, and a public sector organisation’s annual budget and areas of procurement responsibility.

And with decision makers leaving their roles on average every 4.6 years, we’ll even replace outdated contact names on your current customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases.

Better still, our service is fully GDPR-compliant too and, where we’re unable to determine the status of the company or organisation a decision maker on your database owns, we’ll flag it to you as being risky to make outbound marketing contact to.

The databases your colleagues rely on will be cleaner with more decision makers to contact and be fully legally compliant for all direct marketing campaigns and customer out-reach.

Our three data centre enhancement services

The three data enhancement services offered by More Than Words are:

Data cleansing and list cleaning – in addition to cleansing postal addresses, email addresses, fax numbers, and telephone numbers, we can cleanse, validate, and replace supporting information on businesses, schools, and public sector organisations and purchasing responsibilities of target decision makers when meeting GDPR regulations.

Email appending – we take a client’s customer database, prospect database, and bought-in business marketing databases and, when an email address field is empty, we cross-check it against our internal email database and the email databases of our media partners to check to see if we or they have the information. If we or they do, we then add the email address to that particular record as long as it is GDPR-compliant.

Email verification – we check the emails you have on your customer database, prospect database, and bought-in business marketing databases are accurate and that they are GDPR-compliant in addition to checking that the ownership of the web address and email servers has not changed recently indicating that they have been bought by an ISP or spam-trapping organisation.

Although all three services are distinct, most clients order a mixture of these services to ensure that the data they have now is correct and to add data to their databases when they don’t have it.

To find out more about a particular service, please click on the relevant link above.

Please note that we only work with customer, prospect, and bought-in lists of decision makers within UK businesses, schools, and public sector organisations. We are unable to help with either international databases or UK consumer databases.

Investing in improving your data – get in touch

Please contact us and let us know about your company, what you sell, and what you have on any customer, prospect, or bought-in databases you have. Once we’re clear on what it is that you want us to improve the information your sales, marketing, and customer services teams are working from, we’ll come back to you within 24 hours with a quote.

To speak with one of our account managers about enhancing the quality and quantity of your customer, prospect, and bought-in lists, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email our data enhancement management specialists.

Our data enhancement services

Data cleansing

We offer data cleansing, replacement, and validation services on marketing databases. In addition to cleansing postal addresses, email addresses, fax numbers, and telephone numbers, we can cleanse, validate, and replace supporting information on businesses, schools, and public sector organisations and purchasing responsibilities of target decision makers.

  • We can work with:
  • existing customer databases – lists of companies and organisations which have bought from you in the past
  • self-generated prospect databases – lists of companies and organisations which have left their contact details with you for follow-up but which have not bought from you in the past
  • bought-in marketing databases – marketing databases you have purchased from a 3rd party provider like More Than Words no matter how old as long as you hold title to them
Click here for more

Email appending

Gather up all of the databases (customer and prospect) you’ve built together with any old marketing database you’ve bought in since you began trading. Let us breath fresh life into them by adding accurate email addresses for the decision makers within the businesses, schools, and public sector organisations you sell your products and services to.

  • Compared with direct mail marketing and telemarketing, email marketing produces by far and away the highest return on investment
  • With email marketing, you can send a campaign out in minutes from your desktop and start tracking recipient interaction straight away
  • The average return on email marketing in 2012 was £21.48 – now it is over £43
  • Your existing clients are 9 times more likely to buy from you than new clients if you stay in touch
  • Can’t send emails in-house? Ask us about our managed email marketing campaigns service.
Click here for more

Email verification

Over the time your company has been trading, you’ll have accumulated a customer database and a prospect database – lists of businesses, schools, and public sector organisations yet to purchase from you. Add real value back to them with accurate email addresses and contact information. We can even add up-to-date email addresses to the companies and organisations whose email contact details you don’t currently have.

Click here for more

What is data enhancement?

How do we enhance the marketing and customer data I send you? Data enhancement is a process by which the data contained on your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases is:

  • updated – fields on your database (like contact name, email address, line of business, and so on) are checked to see if they are still accurate and, if not, replaced
  • removed – if a business, school, or public sector organisation no longer exists, then it is flagged as such on your database
  • appended – if there are missing fields within your database, those fields will be added so that you have a better and more up-to-date understanding of the characteristics of the businesses or organisations contained on it as well as additional ways to contact the decision-maker
  • originally owned – particularly when enhancing email data, we take steps to ensure that ownership of the domain has not changed recently which may indicate that the email address has become a spam trap.

Do you standardise the output when enhancing my data?

If you request, our data enhancement algorithm can also standardise all of the fields across each of the databases you present us with so that it can be more easily loaded into a CRM system.

Against what databases do you check my data?

In addition to our own data on decision makers within businesses, schools, and public sector organisations, we also have access to the databases of our media partners.

In total, we have information on over 3,300,000 decision makers including the businesses and organisations they work for, their names, their job titles, their areas of purchasing responsibility as well as the ways to contact them (specifically phone, email, and post).

When you send us your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases, each entry and each field within each entry is checked against our database and our media partners’ database.

For example, if you sell to businesses and you send us over customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases containing businesses, the B2B data enhancement work we carry out for you is done in partnership with four other media companies offering you the greatest update scope.

We work with different media partners on our education and public sector data enhancement services.

Our database and our media partners’ databases are constantly updated over the course of the year and our method of data collation and updating is fully compliant with GDPR legislation.

Please note that we do not use data mining techniques when providing services to clients because the results produced by such methods are difficult to verify, prone to inaccuracies, and often against the rules set out in the GDPR guidelines.

Data enhancement FAQ

For our business database, we can enhance, verify, validate, or append the following fields where available on a record:

  • title for salutations (for example, Mr, Mrs, Dr, Miss, and Sir)
  • name (separate fields for first and last name)
  • job title (the job title reported by the contact)
  • area of purchasing responsibility (most senior contact, engineering procurement, facilities management, finance, fleet, health and safety, human resources, marketing, operations, general procurement, sales, and telecoms)
  • company name
  • line of business
  • legal status
  • postal address including 2 lines for the address, town, county, and postcode
  • telephone number (main switchboard number)
  • the email address given by the contact as the address they’d prefer to receive emails at
  • number of employees
  • number of branches
  • type of premises
  • website address
  • level of turnover
  • year the original company began trading
  • company registration number
  • incorporation date
  • net worth
  • profit or loss making?
  • %age increase or decrease in profitability YOY
  • turnover increase or decrease YOY (shown in pound sterling)

The schools databases we use for enhancing, verifying, validating, and appending include:

  • information on over 50,000 schools in Britain (pupils taught, type of school, how a school is funded and hundreds of other variables),
  • contact names (normally the head teacher)
  • school postal addresses,
  • school telephone numbers, and
  • school email addresses.

For public sector data, the information we check against includes the following:

  • Contact salutation – Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms, Dr – etc
  • Contact first name
  • Contact initial – first name abbreviated to the initial letter
  • Contact last name
  • Contact job title – official job title
  • Contact seniority – level of management within the organisation they work for
  • Contact qualifications – educational or vocational qualifications the contact is known to have
  • Contact town or city – the town or city in which the contact is based
  • Contact postal address – The postal address at which the contact is based
  • Contact email address – the email address of the contact
  • Contact phone – the direct number for the contact (if this is not available, please use the switchboard number contained in the organisation fields – more about that in the next FAQ answer)
  • Organisational annual spend – the organisation’s spend over twelve months shown in millions.
  • Organisational county – the postal county in which the contact is based
  • Organisational internal department name – the name of the internal department which the contact works in
  • General organisational grouping – Local Government, Regional Government, Central Government, NHS, QUANGOs, etc
  • Organisational main email – the main e-mail address for the organisation
  • Organisational main phone – the main telephone/switchboard number for the organisation
  • Organisational main site – indicates is the person is located at the headquarters or main site for the organization they work for
  • Organisation name – The official legal title of the organisation
  • Organisational staffing level – Number of Employees employed across the organisation
  • Organisational notes – Useful information we find about the organisation including forthcoming changes/mergers and so on
  • Organisation Type – includes a top level description of the type of organisation a contact is working for (for example, an NHS Trust, Local Authority, and so on)
  • Organisation Type Additional – used to further clarify an organisation or to describe a specific department within an organisation (for example, an Acute Trust, Metropolitan Council, and so on)
  • Organisational Postcode – the postcode of the location at which the contact is based

The following information is used where applicable:

  • Parish/town/community councillors – population covered by the parish council displayed in bandings
  • Care home type
  • Care home capacity
  • FE and HE – number of students (numbers are banded)
  • Housing Association – the type of tenants
  • Housing Association – the type of housing
  • Housing Association – the number of units or houses owned or managed
  • Housing Association – whether the association is currently building new homes or units
  • Housing Association – the name of a parent organisation (where applicable)
  • Local Government contacts – the population served
  • Local Government contacts – the controlling political party
  • Local Government contacts – the last time political control changed hands
  • Local Government contacts – the next election date
  • Local Government contacts – the official LA code
  • Local Government contacts – the number of seats within an LA
  • Local Government contacts – the name of the ward represented by a councillor
  • NHS Primary Care – the population covered (shown in bandings)
  • NHS Primary Care – the number of GPs within a practice
  • NHS Primary Care – the official code for the practice

Yes. Postal address accuracy is a governing factor determining the success of any direct mail marketing campaigns your company invests in and we want to ensure the minimum possible number of goneaways on your campaigns.

In addition, discounts offered to companies investing in direct mail marketing are volume-based and based upon the accuracy of the underlying data used on the campaign. All data enhancement work involving postal addresses are confirmed using the Royal Mail PAF data file.

Other than our standard policies on accuracy and the legality of our collation and maintenance processes governing non-consumer email data, we do not verify, validate, or append email data for UK sole traders or partnerships as this is in contravention of GDPR guidelines.

More Than Words regularly carries out phone-based data enhancement work for clients using our in-house telemarketing team.

When contacting customers, prospects, and contacts contained on the database(s) you send us, we can add any extra information you require about the businesses, schools, and public sector organisations whose decision makers we’re speaking with on your behalf as well as checking on the overall accuracy of the data you hold.

For more information on our phone-based data enhancement service, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.

Yes. All marketing databases sold by More Than Words are subject to accuracy guarantees on the three major contact methods (email, phone, and fax) and we offer the same guarantee on our data enhancement services.

Contact us to find out more about our data enhancement service

Please get in touch with one of our account managers. Let them know about the customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases your teams are working from and any issues that the data is presenting you with which prevent you from making sales or looking after clients post-purchase.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There is plenty of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk from North Shields Metro station.

Want to know more about our data enhancement service?

Then please speak with one of our account managers, you can reach us on 0330 010 3495, via emailhere, or by filling in the form below.