Are you looking for a data hygiene service provider with these key characteristics?

• an in-depth understanding that clean, correct data drives success
• professional communication and project management skills
• a quality control program designed to catch mistakes before they happen
• an eye for saving you money on postage or production costs
• a broad knowledge of Canadian and US postal regulations

Do you know all the ways that enhanced data can save you money and improve your success?

Call Steve today 1-866-635-8050

Call now to speak with us directly !

Data Hygiene and Data Clean Up - Canada or USA

Poor marketing data costs you money and can cause embarassment.

It is estimated that as much as 18% of marketing revenue and fundraising potential is lost due to poor data quality. This Dynamic Markets report details the importance of data quality.

You can read an idependent report on the cost of poor data quality here : Data Quality Independent Report- Part 1 and Part 2

Poor quality marketing data can be costly and make you look like you don’t know to whom you are talking.  Our return clients know that not all data hygiene is created equally.  We eliminate more duplicates, find more moved people and clean up data so it speaks brilliantly when you communicate with it.  We wrote our own software and have refined the craft of data hygiene.  It is more than just eliminating duplicates.

How does that pay off?

A fundraiser does not want to ask for a $5.00 donation from someone who once gave $100 on a regular basis and similarly a consumer goods marketer does not want to be repeatedly prospecting a new lead who is actually a satisfied client.

People move, data is often collected poorly, and it ages.  One person could be known as J. Falk, J.S. Falk, John Falk, Steve Falk and Steven Falk or simply Mr. Falk at a couple of addresses.  Would you know how to contact him properly?

Ask us to run your data through our tools.  Your marketing decision making and messaging will become clearer.

Top objectives of data hygiene

• Don’t talk to your existing contacts like you have never met them
• Don’t drop multiple pieces of mail or email unnecessarily
• Don’t lose track of clients who move
• Don’t miss an opportunity to talk to the client at a personal level.
• Select new prospects based on what you already know about your contacts
• Clean up profanity and nonsense text in data

You don’t want to mix your prospects with your existing house list of contacts.  We wrote our own merge purge process that properly identifies cross-overs between the two lists.  You can follow a contact through multiple house moves and name variations and you won’t mistake him/her for someone else – is J. Falk who bought a Mercedes in Toronto the same S. Falk you will invite to buy a Civic in Aurora. 

The menu of data cleanup options

Westminster International is an award-winning provider of superior Direct Marketing Support Services. Over the last twenty years we have built a reputation for the high quality of our data hygiene programs and currently process data files for a wide range of major blue-chip companies in the USA and Canada. We can work with batch files that you send to us and now these exclusive services are seamlessly available for any website that subscribes to our service via an easy to use interface. With a simple-to-program call from any authorized computer connected to the Internet it is now easy to pass us a Name, Address, and email collected from a web form or an existing database. We will instantly validate and enhance the data and return it back in any one of a wide variety of standard or customized formats.

We provide the following services for just pennies a name - there's no program to purchase, install and maintain. With no long-term committments it's the perfect solution for contests, sweepstakes, enrollment forms, e-commerce applications, desktop applications etc. In fact any application that captures name, address or email information.

We use our proprietary tool, PostMaster, to enhance the data you are collecting today or use the service to validate and correct exisiting databases and mailing lists in legacy applications without the investment and hassle of integrating and maintaining yet another piece of software.

Address Correction and Validation
Any address in North America will be standardized to Post Office guidelines, the Zip Code or Postal Code will be validated, corrected or supplied if missing and in the case of US records, the Zip+4 added. Street name spellings will be corrected, street types and directionals will be modified or inserted as required and city or community names checked for accuracy.

Each address is returned with a status code that indicates if the address was validated and this provides you with an opportunity to have the user "double-check" suspect information before storing it in your database. For companies that may use a mailing address in a Direct Marketing program the savings can be enormous. For those shipping products through the mail, a bad address can triple your handling costs as you end up paying for the initial mailing, the return postage and finally the postage and handling costs to remail to the correct address. In the worst case, your package may be misdelivered or lost entirely. A simple call to the PostMaster service could avoid this entirely.

Duplicate Elimination - Merge Purge
We write our own software for this process and have refined our processes in this area because one of the most important tasks in preparing campaign data is merge purging the data. It makes a campaign more efficient and importantly, it makes you, the DM campaigner look good and perform even better.



Here are typical situations that can be avoided in your next direct marketing campaign:

1. You could mail several pieces to the same address and appear wasteful
2. You could present a "new client" or "new donor" offer to an existing client and appear unaware of your existing donors and clients relationship to your organization. Imagine the cost of sending a $25.00 donation request to a donor who regularly contributed $500 each year in the past? Whoops!
3. You could lose a great client or donor because they have moved a couple of times in the recent past. How do you find them?

Don't be convinced that off-the-shelf duplicate elimination software will help you avoid these situations effectively. Many of our competitors are using canned software for this important task. Our own software and the processes we follow have been refined over years of DM campaign experience and the results are incomparable. In many cases we are using Address Validation, NCOA (see below) and Merge Purge in tandem to produce these remarkable results. We will give you a free test to compare work down by a competitor if you request it.

Find more duplicates, find more moved individuals, save postage, do the most to recognize and communicate appropriately to existing clients.

Address Data Input Accuracy Solution - QAS Experian TM

You spend too much time entering addresses in your business or visitors do on your website. Despite best efforts, it is still not completely correct. Whether you are a call centre, hospital admitting desk, retailer, web designer or fundraiser, you will find QAS a time saving tool that improves accuracy and helps to protect your data asset.

Here is how QAS it looks on the screen. Alt-Q brings it up. You start by entering a zip or postal code and with only a few more keystrokes the software completes the rest of the address and fills in whatever form you are using at the time. On a webpage it does this behind the scenes. As a bonus, this is a solution for both Canada and the US addresses.

Contact us to get a free demo that will convince you nearly immediately. You'll join over 10,000 other satisfied QAS users.

Westminster is the licensed reseller of QAS in Canada.

Intelligent Case Conversion
Have you ever noticed how users on the Internet never use the Shift Key on their keyboard or type everything in upper case? If you plan on using that data for subsequent communication or website personalization then the poor quality of the input may make you look less than professional. Our case conversion routines do much more than simply to capitalize the first letter of each word. We use a combination of algorithmic and dictionary based conversions to yield the highest quality output that you can be proud to use in your corporate communications.

Dynamic Salutations
Talking to customers and prospects on the Internet has never been easier and personalizing the content you deliver is becoming more important. But talk to them the wrong way and you can do more harm than good. When names are supplied to us we dynamically construct a "Salutation" field that can be used in personalized communications. After all, when a user enters "George W." in the First-Name field of your web form, you want to say "Thanks George" after they press the Submit button. But if the user just entered his or her initials, we think you'll agree that "Thanks Mr. Bush" looks much better than "Thanks G. W."

National Change of Address (NCOA)
For Canadian mailing records we can optionally check the name and address against our database of over ten million records of individuals and companies who have moved in the last three years. If you currently have a database that includes names more than six months old we can provide the new address providing the Post Office was notified of the change. Names are tracked across multiple moves and the new address is coded to indicate if it is for only the individual supplied, the entire family or if this was a corporate move.

Now any internal application can have access to mover information providing you can demonstrate that you are in posession of the old mailing address. This service is of huge benefit to insurance companies, associations, financial institutions, charities and many other types of company who wish to keep their lists up to date.

For more detail see our page dedicated to NCOA Services.

DNCL - Do Not Call List

The National Do Not Call List has millions of registrants. If your list requires comparison to the list of those who do not wish to be contacted, we have the solution. Simply send us your address and phone list file and we will return it with the DNCL registered phone numbers indicated. If you are performing any telemarketing, you are advised to reference the DNCL official website https://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/index-eng to see how the legislation affects you. At the very least every organization should be building an opt-out list in-house so that you don't telemarket to your constituents who prefer to be left alone. In some cases, it may be the law that you build such a list.

Identification of Suspect Data
One of the biggest problems with web-based forms is the number of people who supply bogus information in one or more of the input fields. Many users protect their annonymity by typing nonsense or vulgar language to defeat your error-checking routines but without a way to segregate bad data from the good, your entire database becomes suspect.

PostMaster checks each field against a dictionary of offensive words and analyses the input for repetative sequences or random strings. Frequency analysis then determines the probability that the user has entered bogus input and flags the return data accordingly. You can then choose to re-serve the form to your user asking them to check their input or segregate the information for manual confirmation before sending expensive literature to non-existant addresses or individuals.

While we cannot catch all bad input in this way we can significantly improve the integrity of the data you are storing in your databases.

Latitude and Longitude Information
For every mailing address supplied to PostMaster, we return the Latitude and Longitude which can enable you to determine proximity of the record to a specific location using a simple mathematical formula. If we are supplied with the Zip Code or Postal Code of a target location we will even tell you the distance between the two points.

Transferring Data to Westminster

We work with batch files sent directly to us for processing. Click here for details on:

• Sending and Receiving Data
• Media Format Requirements

Performance and Privacy
The PostMaster Web Service runs on a high-availability load balanced server farm with multiple machines capable of handling hundreds of concurrent requests. Our system includes redundancy at several levels to ensure maximum availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Although data is passed to us for correction, no information is ever retained on our systems other than to record the request and the result for billing purposes. We never collect, archive or reuse any information that we validate.

For those concerned about confidentiality, we support several encryption schemes so that sensitive information can pass across the Internet securely and safe from prying eyes. We are happy to discuss specific concerns or requirements with you as our system boasts considerable flexibility and we can usually accomodate unusual requests.

So stop collecting data on your website that you don't have the confidence to use in your marketing efforts. Ensure the accurate delivery of Requests For Information and product shipments today! Our system is easy to implement and use and we provide detailed statistics on your useage to allow you to track and assign costs to specific forms on your website or departments that should bear the cost.

A competent webmaster should be able to have the system running within an hour and since there's no long term obligation or high monthly overhead you have very little to lose. Why not put us to the test?

If you would like to enjoy the benefits of clean, useable data from your website without the hassle of buying and maintaining expensive software, then call us today at (416) 494-6245 or simply REQUEST MORE INFORMATION.