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Last week, our Women in Experian group hosted an event in our Boston office, focused on how to “Achieve our Peak Perforce,” led by Christine Fiske. Christine is a Senior Digital Marketing Freelance Consultant, working primarily with startups and VC firms. Currently, she is working to become a leadership development facilitator and presented her session about achieving peak performance. Here are three takeaways I gained from this unique event: 

If companies are collecting data, but it's inaccurate or outdated, they're only going to get themselves into trouble. Here are three examples of data quality best practices.

After collecting email addresses through various channels and validating only the form and syntax of those collected through their Ecommerce channel, Cabela’s had amassed a large number of suspected “bad” email addresses over the years. Experian Data Quality's batch email cleansing solution helped them recover a significant portion of email addresses to include in email marketing communications. 

NameSearch is Experian Data Quality’s premier matching solution that can accurately and efficiently identify duplicates within your systems. NameSearch uses fuzzy matching to identify records that lead to the same individual, despite the misspellings, nicknames, typos, extra, or missing information across a single or multiple databases. It’s useful for organizations in any vertical that might require a matching solution, and, because of that, it is highly customizable.

Reading the statistics on cart abandonment rates can be quite sobering. Sixty-seven percent of online carts are abandoned before a purchase is made and, apparently, about 97 percent of mobile carts are abandoned. The reasons oft quoted are myriad but one of the bigger issues is simply the time it takes to check out; the longer it takes, the more likely that your customer will become distracted. Plus, when the shopping process requires any significant amount of typing on a mobile, forget it! Although you have to find a way to enable accurate address capture and to collect other important information, requiring customers to input too much is surely one reason that the mobile abandonment rate is so high.

I recently received an email from Hubway, the bike-share program here in Boston. The subject read “Join the 2017 Hubway Data Challenge presented by Microsoft – over $7,500 in prizes.” Now for a little bit of background information, I am a regular user of Hubway. I live next to a docking station, so to get to work every day I take it to the nearest subway stop, which also has a docking station. I do this again on my way back home each night. On the weekends, I sometimes take it to the gym, which conveniently has two docking stations within walking distance. On a few occasions, my wife and I will bike from Fenway Park after a baseball game to the closest Red Line subway station to avoid the foot traffic. Let’s just say I use it a lot.

If you’re an educational institution that receives lists of prospective students on a weekly basis or a retail organization that is preparing for a direct mail marketing campaign, it is important to have the proper tools in-house to ensure that your addresses are being cleansed and standardized for your marketing initiatives.

Do you consider yourself data driven? Do you use the data you have to make informed, strategic decisions? If so, you’re in good company. In fact, more than 80 percent of organizations believe that data is an integral part of forming their business strategy. With such an emphasis on making informed decisions, it’s really important to trust the data you’re working with. Right?

Cyber security is a hot-button issue today. From allegations of election hacking to consumer credit card data being swiped from the nation’s largest retailers, one thing is certain: you can never be too secure with your handling of data. According to estimates by Juniper Research, cybercrime will costs businesses over $2 trillion by 2019.

As of January 22, 2017, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has implemented rate changes for mailing and shipping, which includes the first increase in the price of Forever stamps since January 2014. If you rely on these services to send coupons or get goods to customers, you should consider how the increased mailing and shipping costs will impact your prices and your bottom line.