Data is an essential part of running any modern business. It’s what allows marketers to reach, acquire, and retain their most valuable customer groups. For all of these benefits, however, there is such a thing as too much data. Multiple studies have revealed that anywhere from 30% to 70% of CRM data becomes out-of-date each year, which doesn’t even account for extraneous, duplicate, and junk records. Such poor-quality data can have a direct impact on revenue and degrade a brand’s reputation.
For all of these reasons, data cleaning is an essential practice that marketing teams should carry on periodically, trimming away any unnecessary information. But how can you scrub a database without losing your most valuable insights?
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Avoid Duplicate Records
Duplicate information can crop up in any CDP or CRM product. If a customer moves or changes their name after a marriage, it’s not unusual for them to mistakenly re-register with the new information. Whatever the circumstance, duplicate records can prompt multiple email deliveries, triggering spam filters to ensure none of them reach your inbox.
As such, the most straightforward cleaning task a marketer can do is merge or delete any duplicate user records. Just remember to keep the longer-running profile — it will better serve marketers when calculating LTV.
Clear Junk Contacts
When using automated data collection processes, you will periodically find profiles created by bots instead of genuine customers. Perhaps they use celebrity names or make use of nonsense email addresses. Whatever the case, junk contacts are a waste of resources that marketers shouldn’t deal with. Even worse, they can inflate your user numbers, giving you an inaccurate picture of engagement.
During a data cleanse, take some time to identify and delete junk profiles from your database. If necessary, make use of digital tools that can flag these profiles for you, but verify them manually before removing them.
Fact-Check Your Records
Once you have addressed any obvious duplicates and junk profiles, it’s important to validate data relating to your actual customers. Is their email address up to date? Are there any notable typos in their personal information? This process can be time-consuming, but it’s also incredibly important to ensure that your database is in working order.
Standardize Data Inputs
The easiest way to clean your data is to ensure it’s relevant at the point of ingestion. Wherever possible, marketers should take steps to standardize data inputs across the organization. If your brand manages multiple forms with different data entry fields, the higher the chance that errors will take place.
This step sounds easy enough, but it’s also where people tend to overlook minor-yet-crucial flaws. Something as simple as how you store a phone number can create compound errors when there is no standardized process in place.
Create a Data Quality Plan
By this point, you’ve not just scrubbed your customer database — you’ve also probably managed to locate a few problem areas in your data collection process. If so, it’s a good idea to formalize a data quality plan that keeps decayed data to a minimum and optimizes any future cleanses.
A data quality plan should define the following:
- Data points that are necessary for marketing purposes
- Standardized processes used for collecting data
- Common problems to watch for
- Policies for how data can be corrected in real-time, such as when a customer makes an update to their information
- Policies for periodic data cleaning
That last point is especially important. Databases are like houses — the longer you refuse to clean them, the messier and dustier they become. By validating your records and clearing information that isn’t relevant, you will equip your team to better reach, acquire, and retain valuable customers.