Why Is Data Cleansing Important?

Large companies live or die based on their data, so you’d think that marketing data would be strictly controlled and thoroughly recorded and maintained. But this is often not always the case. In fact, in non-tech companies, where marketing automation adoption rates were only 3% in 2014, this is often almost never the case.

Database maintenance isn't at the highest of anyone’s priority list. Combing through thousands of contacts may be a daunting task, but it can and will pay rich dividends. Read on to seek out out why every marketer should prioritize a clean, tidy, and up-to-date marketing database—and why doing so can maximize company revenue.

1. Keep Track of Customer and Contact Data Expiration Dates

Like meat on supermarket shelves, milk within the fridge, or prescription drug sitting in your cabinet, all customer contacts and data have a use-by date. While each contact is clearly different, experts estimate that up to 25% of your data expires annually.

This figure could seem stunning initially, but it makes plenty of sense. In today’s fast-paced economy, the typical job is held for about two years (after accounting for turnover, promotions, etc.). Add that majority of the lead lists are often up to fifteen months old at the time of generation or purchase, and cleaning out data immediately becomes a transparent priority.

2. Understand Your Target Market

Know your audience, and you'll succeed. This is often as true for comedians and actors because it is for business people and marketers. With clean data, market reporting and analysis are straightforward to conduct and execute.

Most importantly, you’ll notice that clean data generate actionable business intelligence, which may be used to further hone your marketing techniques, generate updated and reliable reports for Salesforce, and make your analytics far more useful and workable.

3. Organize, Innovate, and Personalize Your Marketing

If you don’t know where you’re going, you would possibly not get there. How are you able to know where you’re going without a correct map to start with? Clean data will drive any large-scale sales strategy because it allows you to plan and execute new marketing campaigns with a reliable degree of accuracy and efficiency.

Without clean data, there's simply no way you'll have dynamic, engaging, and (most importantly) personalized marketing. By its very nature, personalizing marketing and outreach demands that you simply have the foremost current info on your customers. This includes logging their recent purchases, website activity, and (if possible) life developments like getting married and new additions to the family.

4. Avoid Inconsistency and Incompleteness

“To be ready to correlate data quality issues to business impacts, we must be ready to classify our data quality expectations also as our business impact criteria,” said David Loshin, President of Knowledge Integrity, Inc.

Is all the knowledge you would like available? Are there expectations that data values conform to specified formats? Do distinct data instances conflict with an equivalent data object? Are values consistent across data sets? What data relationships are missing important linkages?

These are all questions that have got to be answered. Analysts can better determine the scope of underlying root problems and address data quality issues only by reviewing data completeness, conformity, consistency, accuracy, and integrity.

These are all factors that contribute to the loss of leads and revenue. Rather than having to constantly sift through every contact line, hoping to correct poor leads and bad data passed from legacy systems, clean data can help save time and money by avoiding poorly organized, mass uploads.

5. Segment and Target People With Content Aligned to Their Persona

Problem: Campaigns don’t end up the way you’d like, and opt-outs always seem to get on the rise. If this sounds like you, likelihood is that you’re affected by implementing a “one-size-fits-all” approach to marketing.

Solution: Relevance drives conversion. Or, relevance = conversion = revenue. It’s an easy equation. You would like to focus on prospects based on who they're and also what their profession is.

Clean data is the initiative for segmentation. The proper solution allows you to match, cleanse, de-duplicate, and standardize all of your data. Any time a brand new contact enters your database, they’re automatically categorized into discrete segments.

For example, counting on how you input your data, the straightforward title “Chief Financial Officer” could exist in 20 different permutations. Marketing automation solves the matter by filtering and mapping many permutations to one segment.

6. Avoid Duplicate Leads

Imagine emailing someone twice, with the same message, within the span of 5 minutes. The loss in trust caused by that redundant email is tough to overstate. It can close up a possible client, cause them to unsubscribe from your list, and lose your potential revenue and goodwill.

This happens with expiring data, but it’s an absolutely avoidable mistake. These duplicate emails happen because there are duplicate leads—quality leads that were classified wrong or entered twice.

Another problem is when leads don’t find yourself receive any follow-up messages, which is equally damaging to your bottom line. Thankfully, there are apps and third-party programs to assist you to get around the issue of duplicate leads, which makes the cleaning data process that much easier.

7. Economize and Scale Affordably

If you’re having problems with dirty data, the only solution might be to use the advanced data cleansing solutions in your current marketing automation system. Reducing the contacts in your marketing automation database can assist you to economize. Deleting contact data that's hard-bounced, unsubscribed, and invalid will assist you to economize.

8. Boost Your Revenue

When watching data hygiene as an entire, clean data will boost your revenue and increase earnings. But it’s not just a matter of money—with increased revenue comes efficiency, a newfound sense of confidence, and a new, improved outlook. Cleaning data can cause improved morale for sales teams, too.

Don’t Serve McDonald’s at a Black-Tie Party

Having expired data and poor leads as an enterprise organization maybe a little like serving McDonald’s at a black-tie party. Despite having every resource at their disposal, some enterprise organizations do exactly that. They fail to accurately identify their lead and customer needs and find yourself trying to shut or upsell with irrelevant offers and promotions, which just results in more wasted resources.

Data cleansing may be a simple fix that would save millions in unoptimized marketing campaigns, poor alignment between marketing and sales, and a tarnished brand image.

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