Marketing database cleansing |
Purge/replace inaccurate data |
Add information you don’t have |
Cleanse customer databases |
Cleanse prospect databases |
Cleanse bought-in databases |
Data cleansing is a daily activity at More Than Words Marketing.
Offering our clients the most comprehensive and accurate marketing databases available is our unique selling point.
This commitment to data quality allows us to call ourselves one of the country’s leading suppliers with legitimacy.
Every marketing database we sell is our clients’ passport to generating leads and making sales from businesses, schools, and the public sector.
We use the same high quality data when we run managed email marketing campaigns or managed telemarketing campaigns for clients.

Incomplete or inaccurate data, duplicate records and inadequate research would mean substantial information gaps on our databases.
Our clients wouldn’t enjoy the success they have from telephone and email marketing campaigns.
Clearly data accuracy matters.
And there is another upside – we can cleanse our clients’ customer and prospect databases against our master database.
We can check every record you own to make sure that you’re working with the very latest information.
Bad data is your own “sales prevention squad”
What happens when you work with bad data?
You might face things like:
- phone calls where the receptionist doesn’t know who you are,
- emails which are returned saying that the server does not have a record of that person,
- postal mail addressed to a company which moved last year,
- personalised emails to the wrong person, and
- personalised postal mail with spelling mistakes
The first disadvantage of using inaccurate data is that you miss out on multiple opportunities to stay connected to your customers.
You won’t be able to cross-sell or up-sell to your clients because the contact details you hold are incorrect.
Everyone in business knows that it’s much easier to generate revenue from customers and decision makers who:
- already know you.
- the value of your products and services, and
- how you look after you’re them post-purchase.
The second disadvantage are the missed opportunities with prospects on lists you have bought in, and from prospects you have generated yourself.
Each business suffers customer churn and it’s imperative to constantly replenish and add to the number of clients they serve.
The third disadvantage is that inaccurate and missing data frustrates sales and marketing staff.
Your sales and marketing team is the beating hearts of your business.
Without your sales and marketing team generating the enquiries and revenue they generate, there is no company.
These staff members arguably have the hardest job in your business and they’re under constant pressure to perform.
It’s the duty of every business to remove as many obstacles in the path of their sales and marketing professionals.
With accurate and complete data, you can squeeze even greater revenue from your team without hiring extra staff.
What type of data can we cleanse?
Use More Than Words’ professional services for data cleaning, replacement, and validation services on marketing databases.
We can cleanse, validate, and replace supporting information for businesses, schools, and public sector organisations.
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, and
- bought-in databases – marketing databases you have purchased from a 3rd party like More Than Words Marketing.

Call to action
High data quality is crucial to any company which proactively markets its products and services to businesses, schools, or public sector organisations.
As well as our own database, we have direct access to the databases of some of Britain’s leading media partners.
They have their own comprehensive, precise, and constantly-updated marketing databases.
Data cleansing benefits
Refresh brought-in and prospect lists
Every business churns clients – they cease business, they’re tempted to another supplier, or any number of other reasons.
We strongly encourage all clients to stay in touch with their existing clients but you should constantly use bought-in lists and prospects lists to open new accounts.
- Email marketing – regular email marketing produces a return of £42 per £1 spent .
- Telephone marketing – two-way conversations with your clients of the future
- Postal marketing – offering the best return on investment in years with an average of 29%
- Direct marketing needs accurate data – make every email, phone call, and letter count and reduce your cost per lead and cost per sale
Monetise your customer base
Stay in touch with the decision makers within businesses, schools, and the public sector who have already bought from you.
Use email, phone, and postal marketing to greatly increase the chance of significantly growing revenue. This will also increase profitability, and preventing them from defecting to a competitor.
To do that, data quality is key.
- Happy clients are more likely to upgrade or buy more and less likely to leave
- Increasing your customer retention rate by 5% leads to a 25-95% jump in profitability
- Opportunity – only 19% of your competitors manage their customers’ experiences
- Loyalty counts – loyal customers 5 times more likely to buy and 7 times more likely to try a new product or service from you
How does the service work?
What is data cleansing?
Data cleaning (sometimes called data scrubbing) is the process of finding duplicated, incomplete, or inaccurate fields within a database with the goal of either replacing the data contained within a field with new, clean data or deleting the data in that field if there is no accurate data to replace it.
More Than Words Marketing’ data preparation service provides clients with clean data for sales and marketing purposes.

When we’re data cleansing for a client, our job is to:
- identify data errors,
- replace fields duplicated, inaccurate, and missing, and
- update contact and organisational information with the latest, up-to-date information.
Why is data cleansing important?
Data cleansing is important to any company using a database to reach prospective customers or keep in touch with their existing customer list.
Additionally, it is important for data analysis at the end of any direct marketing campaign, ensuring that your marketing team does not make irrelevant observations, caused by incorrect or duplicate data.
Marketing and customer data accuracy deteriorates over time.
A report from Gartner indicated a decay rate of around 3% per month. Informatica estimates that the data decay rate is around 70.3% per annum.
Both of these estimates are on the high side in our experience of B2B, education, and public sector data cleaning.
In the UK, around 25% of every data set we cleanse for clients is either duplicated, incomplete, or has missing values or inaccurate fields after one year.
If the data you hold, whether you generated it yourself or you have bought marketing databases from other companies, is up to 25% inaccurate, you lose opportunities to sell to new companies and organisations on marketing lists.
You could also lose the opportunity to maintain good customer relationships with your existing clients.
There is a financial cost to dirty data if your data analytics reports are skewed and, in the era of GDPR, a reputational risk too if the data you’re using is deemed by the IO to be inaccurate or missing values.
How do you organise the data cleansing process?
While data cleansing software exists and offers a basic data cleaning process, we believe that cleaning data requires the human touch.
When a client contacts us to deal with a data quality issue, there is a multi-step process to mapping, refreshing and appending the information on their customers and their prospects.
First, we ask you what you want to achieve from your dataset.
- How do you intend to use it?
- Do you wish to use the data to contact clients by email, phone, or post?
We’ll need to examine any dataset you currently hold.
After examination, we’ll be able to determine whether there are structural errors to your database and how much information it’s missing (in other words, fields which have not been added yet, duplicate records or fields which exist and which are currently empty).
We’ll then “hex” the database and compare it with “hexes” on the databases we hold and the databases of our suppliers.
At this point, we’ll have a clear understanding of how to do data cleansing to the specification you require.
At this point and by understanding the marketing and sales routes which are most important to you, we can provide you with a variety of quotes.
Here, the smallest quote would be for the work we need to do to achieve your minimum goals, and the largest quote would enable you to use your data in ways you currently can’t, to generate leads and make sales.
Following the presentation of our quote, the work may take between two days and two weeks depending on its size and complexity.
Data cleansing FAQ
Contact us about our data cleansing service

More Than Words continues to work with companies across a wide range of sectors, supplying them with the highest-quality, most accurate marketing data available for their campaigns to other businesses, to schools, and to the public sector.
Your customer and prospect databases are assets which will generate leads for your sales team and revenue for your company.
Let us check your customer and prospect databases and update any missing or inaccurate information.
We’re available on 0330 010 8300 or you can click here to email us.
Unlock the sales in your customer and prospects lists with data cleansing
To speak with one of our account managers, please call us on 0330 010 8300, click here to email us, or fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.