Email marketing is perhaps one of the most effective ways to promote your business in today's world. Some businesses even accumulate data online so that they can get in touch with their potential customers through various mediums including SMS and calls. The one major problem with accumulation of data is that there is a strong chance most of the data you accumulate would have duplicates. Some of this data could also be incorrect or invalid and while there are a number of techniques that you can use in order to sort and segregate data or clean it, one of the most popular methods that is used today is the merge purge method. If you are familiar with the method but you don't know exactly what techniques are the best then here are the most effective ways that this method comes in handy.

Descending Order

This is the most effective and simplest way to sort out contact details as well as email addresses to ensure that you do not have any duplicate contacts. Scrolling through the list will help you get a fair idea of what contact numbers look similar and even if their formatting is different, you should delete the ones that are similar in nature. This is one of the most convenient to use mouthwash techniques because it doesn't take too much time to figure out how you are going to do it and although it is manual in nature you will be able to point out the contacts that look different from one another to the ones that are similar.

Spelling mistakes are also easier to find out in this method and it doesn't take you too much time to get it cleaned and get a list of numbers that work in your favor. The descending order will ensure that any numbers that are incomplete or not relevant are grouped together so it is easy to spot and this helps you to delete this number immediately. Even when you see the email addresses you will be able to find out email addresses that are not correct and which of them need to be deleted.

Alphabetical

When you are watching out for email addresses, sorting them out in an alphabetical order will help you to note down the ones that are similar even if they belong to different groups. Many people have multiple email addresses that are segregated for their personal and professional use. While these are the same people they may have different email addresses and it doesn't make sense to send the same mail to different emails that are similar in nature. When you sort out an email address list alphabetically the names come one below the other and when you see two names are exactly the same it becomes easy for you to judge whether or not they are the same person or not.

It also helps you to eliminate any family or household names that come together. Sometimes sending out an email to the entire family may not be the best solution and if you want to talk with just one member of the family then sorting his name alphabetically might help you get the people that you are looking to target rather than the entire family. Alphabetically sorting an email address will also help you to eliminate any incorrect email addresses that are spelt wrong when you have too many alphabets clubbed together. For example aaaaa@xyz.com is easier to spot when there are many email addresses there without a similar email ID.

Maiden/married name

Women tend to change their name once they get married and this ends up with them having two email addresses that have a separate Maiden name or a married name. When you use the merge purge technique you are able to sort out data effectively and get a list of email addresses that are free from all of these problems. While people end up spending a lot of time in sorting out data to get rid of duplicate contacts, there are a number of times people have two email addresses that are slightly different from one another and the only way you would be identify this is when you use the merge purge technique to check the records effectively.

At the end of the day it is all about getting a fresh list of data that is free from error and duplicate content. One of the most effective ways for you to get this is that you are able to sort out your data in a hassle free method. This method is recently introduced and is known to be one of the more popular ways to sort out and clean data without any problems.

Businesses often spend a lot of money on data and these investments do not pay them back when they are not able to get results out of it the way they would like to. If you want to make sure that your business is gaining a lot out of the data that you have invested in, clean the data to ensure that every lead that you have is good quality and works in your favor. There are different methods that you can use with this data cleaning solution but it is important for you to make sure that you choose the right technique depending on the format of the data as well as the nature of the data that you are sorting out.

For instance if you are planning to sort out contacts using the descending order works better however if you plan on sorting out email addresses then sorting them out alphabetically is something that you should consider doing. It doesn't take a long time for you to sort data with this technique which is why it helps you to save on a lot of time and effort that you would have initially put into sorting of data. In case you are worried about not being able to sort out this data on your own then you can always hire professionals to do it for you.