For companies looking to do database spring cleaning, HotData, a software and service provider for data delivery and cleansing, launched its e-Luminate products today.
e-Luminate can verify and correct customer data for business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing programs both on- and offline.
This is accomplished through newly announced partnerships with a number of the country’s largest data providers: The Polk Co., the U.S. Postal Service, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian and Group 1 Software.
Information provided by these companies is aggregated in HotData’s database. Using this data, Marketing e-Luminate can clean up marketers’ databases by filling in incomplete fields, including a customer’s address, phone number and fax. It can also update a customer’s change of address through the use of the Postal Service’s FASTforward database.
Marketing e-Luminate’s second feature is its ability to draw customer profiles based on offline demographics. Profiles are drawn from data such as age, income, education, hobbies and interests. On the BTB side, profiles are drawn from public information such as a company’s revenue and number of employees.
These profiles allow marketers to improve decisions and increase marketing effectiveness by identifying and focusing on those most likely to buy, according to Craig Lakey, vice president of marketing for HotData, Austin, TX.
For online marketers, Web e-Luminate provides the functionalities of Marketing e-Luminate, plus real-time address verification. This is useful, as 10 percent of all customers enter addresses that are undeliverable due to input errors, according to Lakey.
If a consumer inputs an incorrect address, the system alerts him or her to this fact and asks him or her to re-enter the address, which improves the validity of leads.
HotData doesn’t gather click-stream analysis or transaction history, nor does it provide analytics. What it does do is provide a foundation for marketing campaigns, said Lakey. “Our competitors are spending tens of thousands of dollars for bells and whistles for analytics. We’re providing information that matters. We’re the guts of the marketing program.”
HotData also derives its data from prior agreements with Claritas Inc., Westminster International, WhoWhere? Inc., InfoSpace.com Inc. and Mailer’s Software Inc.
The products can be integrated with many common customer relationship management systems and cost $10,000 to set up, plus 30 to 40 cents per record.
In January, the company closed a deal for $9 million in financing from J.H. Whitney & Co., TL Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Harte-Hanks.
