Best Practices for Data Preparation

To ensure successful enrichment, it's essential to prepare CRM data through rigorous cleaning, normalization, and formatting before submitting it to an enrichment provider.

ID standardization and integrity

Before submitting a CRM file for enrichment, ensure that each record includes a persistent and unique identifier and does not contain any PII data. This could be a customer ID from your internal systems, and a hashed email (HEM), or a MAID, or a postal address or IP address. These IDs are central to the enrichment process and must remain stable throughout any matching and downstream analysis.

Hashed email address standardization

For emails in particular, standardization is essential. All emails should be lowercased, stripped of leading or trailing whitespace, validated for proper formatting, and include HEMTYPE. If your enrichment provider requires hashed emails, follow their specific hashing guidance. For example, Resonate supports MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256, and provides a script that ensures proper casing and spacing before hashing.

Postal address normalization

When residential postal address is used as a matching input, the quality and completeness of this data significantly impacts match rate and enrichment accuracy. You should provide all critical components:

• Address Line 1 (e.g. street address)
• Address Line 2 (e.g. apartment number)
• City
• State
• ZIP Code (preferably ZIP+4 or ZIP11)

The data should have duplicate records removed and should be cleaned using an address standardization tool such as USPS CASS, SmartyStreets, or similar services. These tools help correct common issues such as abbreviations, typos, or missing apartment/unit numbers. Missing or malformed address data often results in records being unmatched.

MAID cleaning and validation

If you plan to use mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) such as IDFAs or GAIDs, these too must be validated and standardized. IDs should follow the expected formats, be deduplicated, and normalized (e.g., lowercase). Any blank, malformed, or non-US MAIDs should be removed before submission.

MAID-based matching is particularly sensitive to noise, and poorly maintained MAID fields can drag down both match rates and the quality of appended attributes.

Deduplication and record suppression

Prior to submission, deduplicate your CRM file based on the identifier used for matching. For example, if matching on email, remove duplicate records based on email address; if matching on postal address, deduplicate based on the full residential address; and if using MAIDs, ensure uniqueness by MAID. Submitting duplicate records can inflate processing time and may result in redundant or conflicting attribute enrichments.

You should also suppress any records that are unlikely to yield value from enrichment, such as:

• Entries missing critical fields (e.g., no email, no address)
• Inactive, deceased, or unsubscribed contacts
• International records
• Records lacking consent, particularly in regulated environments

Field validation and formatting

Every field in your CRM file should be reviewed for completeness, accuracy, and consistent formatting. Key identifiers should be validated against expected patterns (e.g., regex for emails or ZIP codes), and character encoding should be confirmed to be UTF-8 to prevent ingestion errors.

Headers should be clearly labeled, free of special characters, and consistently formatted (e.g., using snake_case or camelCase). Avoid using Excel-specific formatting or symbols that may break file parsing.

Privacy and compliance

In the U.S., laws like CPRA, CCPA, VCDPA, and others provide core privacy principles such as transparency, consent, and secure handling of customer data even when hashed. As a result, CRM enrichment workflows must take key considerations and follow best practices:

• Use hashing scripts: These ensure lowercase, trimmed, valid hashes (MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-256 only).
• Hash after validation: Never send unhashed emails even if they are being securely transferred.
• Only submit necessary fields: Exclude names and unneeded PII to reduce exposure.
• Honor consumer rights: Suppress records for users who’ve opted out of data sharing or enrichment

Data quality at Resonate

At Resonate, data quality is foundational to the insights we deliver. When clients follow proper data preparation steps, Resonate is better positioned demonstrate its data quality for clients as part of the validation process.

As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and excellence, we continuously evaluate our match rates and data performance against industry benchmarks. Our overall match rates are strong and compare favorably with those of major credit bureaus. In fact, in an audit, Resonate’s modeled predictions for key demographic attributes—such as age and gender—aligned with data from a top 3 credit bureau over 80% of the time. This level of alignment underscores the accuracy and reliability of our predictive models and their value in powering meaningful audience insights.

We take pride in ensuring that the data our clients rely on is not only comprehensive but also validated against trusted third-party sources, giving marketers the confidence they need to activate, measure, and grow with precision.

Testing your match rate and attribute alignment

As part of our onboarding and quality assurance process, Resonate offers clients a validation step to evaluate match quality and attribute accuracy before full activation. Clients provide a randomized sample—a minimum of 5,000 and a maximum of 10,000—that includes a diverse mix of geographies, customer segments, and behavioral profiles. This test file allows Resonate to:

• Confirm proper formatting and ingestion readiness
• Evaluate match potential against our data environment
• Validate attribute quality by comparing Resonate’s age and gender predictions with a top 3 credit bureau

We review these match and attribute validation statistics with each client, ensuring full transparency and enabling early insights into data performance and audience fidelity. This collaborative step helps uncover issues early and ensures downstream activations are built on a strong foundation of trust and accuracy.

Have questions?

Please reach out to your client success manager or contact us via resonatesupport@resonate.com