Profanity Filters and You: How to @#%& the @#%&ing @#%&ers

God just visited your Web site and downloaded the white paper, “Does the Burning Bush Still Work? Marketing through Fear of Death.” Should you follow up? Darth Vader, Joe Blo, Gandhi, and Amanda Huggenkiss registered too–who is the hot lead and who needs a better hobby?

Marketing data comes from many different sources–online registrations, business reply cards, trade shows, rented lists–how are you to weed through questionable data and throw out the junk while retaining a valuable lead? That’s where the Profanity Filter comes in handy.

A Profanity Filter is a long (and ever-growing) list of names, words and phrases to run up against your marketing database to flag the bad records and keep them from showing up in future campaigns. It’s not always so easy to tell if a record is bad though, and that’s where you get to have some fun looking at the exceptions.

For instance, all of the people who registered above live at 123 Main Street. Two of them live in Blah FU, one in Boulder, CO, one Whitecastle, NY, and one in Panguitch, UT. Will any of these addresses get your “Stone Tablets” follow-up DM piece?

For email addresses you have:
MasteroftheUniverse@heaven.com
LukeImYourFather@DeathStar.com
PasstheCurry@gmail.com
AHuggenkiss@yahoo.com

Who’s going to bounce back and who is going to be your next biggest customer? What if you could get your foot in God’s door? His time to decision is probably longer than most, but talk about an unlimited budget…

Truthfully, God and Darth Vader shouldn’t make it through the first round of the Profanity Filter. Names like God and Darth Vader and Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, Scooby Doo, along with words like Blah, Noone, Noneofyourbusiness and our four-letter friends like @%$&, %&*#, *#%! and the grandfather of all dirty words, $#&*, won’t survive the first round.

Address standardization and Postal Certification will clear out the obviously bad addresses, and what you’ll be left with are the questionable ones like:

Amanda Huggenkiss
123 Main Street
Boulder, CO 80302

The database spits out the record because the street address looks suspicious. If you’re a “Simpsons” viewer you might recognize the name from a prank call to Mo’s Tavern - do you keep the record? A search reveals that there actually is a 123 Main Street in Boulder and even the ZIP is valid. Maybe, as uncomfortable as it must have been to have that name in junior high, Amanda is a real person just waiting to buy your particular widget.

Amanda’s a keeper. The rule is as long as there is no glaring profanity, and as long as there is an apparently valid method of contact, the record is worth keeping. If the mail is returned or the email bounces, you have some more information and can update your contact records. If there is no response to repeated attempts, Amanda will eventually drop off the active list and some letter carrier in Colorado will be denied a little chuckle in an otherwise dreary day.

Now stop trying to translate the four letter words up there and get back to work!