Eraserve AP - Data Services

A Blog for Database Services, List Processing and Address Validation

Elderly Woman defends her home

clock August 22, 2008 01:38 by author Eraserve

85-year-old Pennsylvania woman gets her gun and confronts intruder, makes him call police

I have to comment on this. The article states an elderly lady stopped a robbery in progress by grabbing her gun and holding the thief at gun point.
It further states that with the gun she forced the perpetrator to dial 911.
Because of her gun she was able to stop the robbery and ensure the capture of the thief.
No shots were fired.
This is of course a good thing. However what annoys me is a comment made by an acquaintance, she said and I quote "It is scary to think that an old lady has a gun under her bed." 
So essentially my acquaintance ignores the scary part of the story that someone broke into this ladies home to rob her and or god knows what else. My acquaintance further ignores that it is because of the Ladies gun that the robber was apprehended. It is because of the gun that nothing was stolen and no harm done to an innocent. Had she tried to have stopped the thief without the gun then we would likely have had a casualty...

It is just common sense, 85 year old women need protection under circumstances like these and a gun is a perfect tool to provide that protection. You just the threat of using the gun is usually enough. There is nothing scary about the old lady protecting herself and her belongings at all. 

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5


Website Grader RSS Feed Check

clock August 18, 2008 06:04 by author Eraserve

Sometime after I found Website Grader, a free SEO tool from Hubspot, I decided I needed a RSS feed as the Website Grader recommended.
I quickly pieced one together; it was not very sophisticated and posted it to my front page of www.eraserve.com. I reran the Website Grader and it did not recognize the feed.
Simply placing the Feed link on your front page is not enough, as of today 08/18/2008.

To get Website Grader to recognize your feed, you must have your RSS feed readily available to browsers like FireFox. In FireFox if the Feed is placed on the
webpage correctly it will place a Subscribe Button in the Address Bar this is what the Website Grader looks for. The Following will do this:
In between the <Head> Tags place this:
<link type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://blog.yourwebsite.com/yourfeed" />

Once I placed that in my page and waited for my last ran Grader Score/Cache to expire I re-ran Website Grader and it found my feed finally.


Tags:

Currently rated 5.0 by 1 people

  • Currently 5/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5


Data Management and Consumers Lists

clock August 15, 2008 14:27 by author Eraserve
Have you ever received a direct mail from a company? Most people have and I assume you have to. I am sure just as many have received multiple mailings from the same company of the same advertisement or notice. Obviously this cost them even more for their mailing. Not to mention the waste of resources involved. Why do they do this? Well one possible reason is they (the company) have collected your information multiple times or they hold separate records of people at your address. They have this data and use it to perform their mailing campaigns. What they have not done either because they are unaware of it or because they erroneously think they will lose data, is dedup it. E.G. remove the duplicate records.

Given that many companies send out direct mail to advertise their service or product they spend hundreds to thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars to do this. The lists they use are purchased or collected and maintained via their business. The former sometimes comes from vendors that neglect the quality of data they ship out and the later is often neglected by ignorance of deduping E.G. they do not know how or that it is even needed. Their in house consumer list should be duplicated to a new list the mailing list and deduped prior to mailing.
Given the recent down turn in the economy and everyone’s tighter budgets it simply makes sense and is important to spend a little to save a lot on deduping mailing lists.

 

Tags:

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5


Reasons to use an Address Validation Service

clock August 15, 2008 02:16 by author Eraserve

There are three major reasons to use a third party to validate your Addresses.

Cost: Address Validation service software costs a couple thousand dollars. The vendors charge a huge fee for something that does not see a lot of usage.

Maintenance: The software must be updated regularly to maintain its accuracy. Addresses change all the time and new zip codes get included ect...

Time: Maintenance takes time and time is additional cost. Companies that provide this service keep their software up to date thus letting their customers worry about other business related things. Their fees are a heck of a lot less than the software vendors. It only makes sense to out-source this issue when mailings are done only a few times a year. For example you could spend in excess of $3000 for a piece of software with re-occurring fees to keep it updated. If you outsource the Address Validation Service you not only pay a smaller fee, you pay only when you need it done. You need not spend time on it nor have some one trained to do it.

Tags:

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5


The Costs of bad data

clock August 15, 2008 01:53 by author Eraserve

Bad data in today’s world is prolific. List companies around the world collect data on individuals, companies and institutions on a regular basis. Not all the data remains static. This data is dynamic in nature. People move, names change and companies relocate for multiple reasons. By its very nature, Data involving addresses is volatile.

Billions of dollars is wasted yearly on this bad data. This figure represents wages from the worker stuffing the envelope to the postage and costs creating the material. For example considering time to design, publish and mail costs could be well over $5 per unit. Say you mail 5000 pieces for a total cost of $25,000. Let’s say 3-5% does not get delivered because of the bad data. That is a cool $1250 on mailings that was a complete waste.

Much of your data is old when coming straight from the list company. When was the last time it was validated? It is doubtful that these companies have recently validated your data prior to shipping it. Even if they did a lot of movement happens in a 3 month time frame and could easily make 3-5% of your data invalid and undeliverable. Out of 5000 records it is not unheard of for 150 to 250 of these to be bad records.

If your mailings are undeliverable not only do you lose the money spent to send these mailings you lose possible re-occurring income from conversions. Would it not be wise then to validate your data with an Address Validation Service?


Submit this Form to find out more.
Tags:

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5