Eight million people change jobs each year. 75 phone numbers change every 30 minutes. All of this results in incorrect contact information in your database. Your data is decaying as you read this blog post.
Dirty data has a way of silently infiltrating your organization, creating frustration, inefficiency, and dismal user adoption. It can affect each department and group of stakeholders in a very different way, but unless there is a “State of Our Data” address, the problem is not brought to the forefront of the organization’s collective psyche.
The good news is, you are not alone and there are solutions to find, remove, and prevent bad data as well as enhance the data you already own.
Our ebook, Marketers vs Duplicate Data: How You Can Win, dives into the crux of dirty data and by the end, you’ll have the education and enlightenment to stop bad data once and for all. Here are some takeaways from the ebook.
The result of dirty data is massive
Your reports, automated processes, workflows, and drip nurture campaigns are skewed. Dirty data affects moral, because dirty data is frustrating and inefficient for marketing.
You invest so much time and money into your marketing automation and CRM implementation and ongoing administration and improvement, but it’s all rendered useless when you come into contact with dirty data.
In other words, your CRM and marketing automation databases are a hot mess.
Dirty data costs you money
It could be upwards of $100 per dirty or duplicate record, which is quite serious. Many marketing automation platforms charge based on number of records, so you’re paying for the same data multiple times.
When it comes to duplicates or any problems with your data, the blame game often surfaces. No one wants to take ownership of the data itself. The data owner cannot clean up the database unless they are in lock-step with the departments using the data, including marketing. For instance, if the data owner is a system admin, they need to be advised on which records to merge, as they’re not the marketers running reports or the sales managers pulling performance metrics.
Whatever your messy situation may be, you will quickly realize that it all comes back to quality data, because data is the real value in your CRM and marketing automation platform.
How duplicates happen
Leads come at you from multiple directions. You generate a lead from a free trial, for example, and then that same lead also downloads a whitepaper. Bringing those two actions together without matching email addresses results in duplications. And that’s just marketing. Imagine all the other ways leads come in via sales, lists, referrals, etc. Without a way to manage this, you’re up a creek with no paddle.
This happens more than you would think. For one RingLead customer, 80% of their web form submissions were duplicates. While the range of duplicates can go from 10% to 40% for the average company, the number of duplicates depends on the nature and strength of your data.
Read the free ebook, Marketers vs Duplicate Data: How You Can Win, to stop dirty data once and for all.
Read more: Dirty Database? Clean It Up with Inbound Marketing.
