Data Cleansing Demystified: 3 Things Every Marketer Should Know

Why Data Cleansing Is Critical for Marketing Success

In today’s data-rich environment, businesses collect information from countless sources: web forms, transactions, surveys, third-party providers, and more. Without proper cleansing, that data can be riddled with errors, inconsistencies, and duplicates that undermine performance and decision-making.

Data is the lifeblood of modern marketing. If you’re working with consumer data, you already know how powerful it can be—but only if it’s clean, accurate, and usable. That’s where data cleansing comes in.

It’s not just a technical step, but a strategic necessity. Clean data ensures that marketing campaigns reach the right people, campaign metrics deliver meaningful insights, and compliance standards are met.

What Is Data Cleansing?

Data cleansing is the process of preparing raw data for use by correcting errors, standardizing formats, and ensuring consistency across datasets. It’s the first and most critical step in building a reliable identity graph, a system that connects various identifiers (like email, device ID, and address) to a single individual. Clean data ensures that the information is high-quality and ready to use.

Clean data is foundational to:

• Building identity graphs
• Enriching CRM systems
• Executing accurate, targeted marketing campaigns

Without proper cleansing, data can be misleading, incomplete, or incompatible, leading to poor targeting, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. It’s the difference between guessing and knowing.

Why Clean Data Matters

Clean data is essential for:

• Accurate identity resolution: Matching identifiers across sources requires standardized, validated data
• Effective segmentation and targeting: Clean data enables marketers to confidently group audiences based on real attributes and behaviors
• Improved ROI: Campaigns built on clean data perform better—less waste, more conversions
• Privacy compliance and governance: Ensures data meets privacy standards and reduces risk

Key Components of Data Cleansing

Effective data cleansing involves several steps that work together to improve data quality:

1. Data Hygiene

This is the basic cleanup: removing invalid characters, fixing typos, and eliminating duplicate records. For example:

• Fixing misspelled names or improperly formatted emails or phone numbers
• An email like john.smith@@gmail.com would be flagged and corrected to john.smith@gmail.com

2. Data Normalization

Different datasets often use different labels for the same information. Normalization aligns these fields under a common naming convention.

For example:

• “Estimated Age” vs. “Age”
•  “Street” vs. “St.”
•  “United States” vs. “USA”
  These fields become more unified and easier to match.

3. Data Standardization

Standardization ensures that data follows a consistent format. Addresses, for instance, are standardized using USPS guidelines so they can be matched across systems. Another example:

• Ensuring all dates follow the same format (e.g., MM/DD/YYYY)

4. Deduplication

Duplicate records are merged to create a single, unified profile. This prevents overcounting and ensures that each person is represented only once in your database. For example:

• Merging multiple entries for the same customer

5. Validation

Validation ensures and verifies that data entries are real and usable. For example:

• Checking that email addresses are deliverable or phone numbers are active

The Verisk Marketing Solutions Advantage

Data cleansing isn’t just a technical step—it’s a strategic advantage. It’s what turns fragmented data into actionable intelligence. At Verisk Marketing Solutions, we don’t treat data quality as a checkbox. We treat it as a cornerstone of everything we deliver.

Our data cleansing process is rigorous, multi-layered, and built for scale, ensuring that every attribute we provide is accurate, standardized, and ready for activation. From hygiene and normalization to validation and deduplication, our approach is designed to support enterprise-grade marketing, analytics, and compliance.

We offer award-winning products like our Total Consumer Insights (TCI) consumer data set, which is known for its depth, breadth, and reliability. TCI includes thousands of consumer attributes behavioral, demographic, and more giving marketers the precision they need to segment, target, and personalize at scale.

Paired with our robust identity graph, which connects disparate data sources across devices and channels with high accuracy, we help brands move beyond anonymous signals to engage with real, verified individuals. This means better targeting, stronger ROI, and more meaningful customer experiences.

Whether you’re building your own identity graph or working with a data provider, make sure cleansing is part of the conversation. With Verisk Marketing Solutions, it always is.