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• Only 56% of retail organisations believe they're using their databases to their full potential.
  

  Dynamic Markets 2008

• Three quarters of respondents said they would not open a piece of direct mail that had an incorrect salutation and mistakes in the name and address field.
  

  Mortascreen, 2008

• Data is seen as a strategic asset (by nearly 9 in 10 organisations) and the quality of data is believed to be important in the UK financial services sector, yet investment is currently driven primarily by regulation (73%)

  Dataflux, March 2009

• 9 in 10 have established a widely trusted enterprise view of data

  Dataflux, March 2009

• Financial services organisations have a wide collection of tools at their disposal to manage data, with data cleansing (65%) and data quality (63%) tools mentioned most frequently. Yet almost half of these tools are stand-alone solutions sourced from different providers

  Dataflux, March 2009

• Database management has an 80% impact on the success of the marketing campaign.

  Jorgen Nygaard Andreassen, FEDMA, 2009

• Research conducted by a data security company has found that poor data quality affects as many as "several million" public sector databases. Tom Ilube, chief executive of Garlik commented

  "A typical public database can have error rates approaching ten per cent, meaning that a single large government database could possess erroneous data on several million individuals."

  "Data quality lapses in public sector affecting millions, says report"

• 600,000 letters are misaddressed a week, which equates to 35 million a year

  Guardian.co.uk, 2008

• Businesses send about 87% of all mail in the UK licensed postal market, with the largest 500 companies accounting for 50% of all mail volumes.

  Postcomm. 2007-2008

• Approx 60% of mail goes from business to consumers (B2C), and 27% goes from businesses to businesses (B2B).

  Postcomm. 2007-2008

• The letters market is worth £6.6 billion. The total of this market (in the licensed area) has, dropped slightly - by two per cent in 2007/08 - and accounts for 21.5 billion items.

  Postcomm. 2007-2008

• The number of mailing disposed of or unopened in the past 12 months was less than 15%, down from 21% in 2006-07

  Nielsen Media research, Oct 2008

• 40% of businesses still have over 80% of their data stored in separate systems across their organisation.
• 34% of respondents' citing duplication of effort as a symptom of siloed systems, while 24% say it would stifle innovation and sharing of ideas
• 2009 is said to be a year of modernisation for many companies. Over 20% of companies say implementing a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) would be a top priority, while a further 21% would be seeking application modernisation to fight the recession.

  Software AG, March 2009

• Firms are getting to grips with data hygiene: naming errors were down from 4% to 2.7% and address errors halved from 1% to 0.5%

  Missing the target - Marketing Magazine, October 2008

A recent survey, commissioned by DataFlux on data quality and data governance within financial service organisations shows:

• Data is seen as a strategic asset, by nearly 9 in 10 financial service businesses.
• Data is believed to be important in the UK financial services sector, yet investment in it is currently driven primarily by regulation (73%).
• Data governance is clearly a priority for financial services organisations, with a third having already completed a data governance project and nearly the same proportion currently implementing or considering launching one.
• Responsibility for data quality or governance initiatives tends to be scattered across businesses within financial services. In a third of cases this responsibility belongs to the IT department. Interestingly, 16% of organisations claim 'no-one has specific responsibility'
• Data management tools are available, but half of these are stand-alone solutions from various providers.
• Nearly two thirds believe a lack of attention to or poor control of data within financial institutions is not linked to the recent financial crisis. However a sizeable minority (18%) felt that these issues were at least a contributory factor

  DataFlux, Match 2009

• Database management is crucial to successful marketing campaigns. database management had as much as an 80% impact on the success of the marketing campaign.
• A study carried out by Econsultancy shows that 67% of respondents prioritise the need to find information quickly.

  'Database management is crucial to successful marketing campaigns', February 2009

• 23% of consumers don't complete a website form if they are not offered a address capture tool.
• Since purchasing QAS Pro Web, 75% of Experian QAS customers have seen an increase in data quality.
• In January 2008 the average UK internet user was online for a total of 50 hours.

  Minute Steak, April 2009

• Vivas Health, a Experian QAS customer, reduced their volume of returned mail by 55% after implementing QAS Pro and QAS Pro Web

  Experian QAS customer case study

According to research provided by Experian CheetahMail in January 2009:

• Visits to the top ten online UK retailers grew by an average of 37% year-on-year through the Christmas period 2008.
• 3.8m consumers spent a total of £102m online on Christmas Day 2008, up 21% on the same day last year, according to figures issued by the IMRG. That's an average of £26.80 per shopper, compared with £19.09 per shopper last year.
• Hitwise (an Experian company) has identified Boxing Day as the busiest day of the year in terms of traffic to online retail sites, with visits up 16.2% on the second busiest day of 2008.

• Email user numbers are expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2011

  The Radicati Group, October 2007 Report

• Email marketing now accounts for over 50 % of marketing communications

  B2B Marketing magazine, Email data survey, May 2009

• The proportion of companies spending £10,000 or more on email has risen in last 2 years.
• Over one fifth of respondents send at least half a million emails per month.
• Email accounts for 14% of online marketing budgets. After search (19%) and website (18%)
• 45% believe that the biggest barrier to effective email marketing is the quality of the email database.
• 78% rated email as 'excellent' or 'good' for ROI, higher than any other digital marketing channel.
• 75% undertake 'basic segmentation' in their email strategies, with 19% saying they are planning to implement this.
• 51% have experienced problems reaching recipients' in-boxes in the last 12 months.
• 40%% say that 'Strategy and campaign planning' is the area that email marketers are most likely to focus on in 2009.
• 37%% say that they need to focus on 'list' and 'data quality'
• Targeting contacts with relevant messages from an accurate database is key. Without clean, complete and accurate data, this is not possible. Only 60% of respondents carry our regular list cleaning.

• Contact data erodes over time, 9,000 people move house and nearly 1500 people die daily
• On average, 10% of customer records change every year

  Royal Mail, 2009

• The AA, an Experian QAS customer, were able to verify 45% of addresses (using the data cleaning product, QAS Batch) that could not be matched using their previous system. This equates to approx 3.5 million records.
• QAS Batch improved the AA's marketable database by over 1 million extra contacts

  Experian QAS Customer case study

• Experian QAS customer, WaterAid have increased their donation income by over £12,000 due to an increase in accurate delivery of appeals and magazines. QAS Batch has also increased the speed of data import by 30% which helps free up around 20 days of labour each year.

  Experian QAS Customer case study

• Experian QAS customer, Coloplast implemented QAS Batch with Suppression, and found their database to be 81% accurate after the initial run with 20,000 incorrect records. This has been improved to 98% accurate, with 1,750 incorrect addresses being flagged

  Experian QAS Customer case study