In business, data is everything.
Marketers and salespeople heavily rely on huge volumes of customer and sales data in order to be able to tailor campaigns and promote their products or services.
Therefore, it’s only logical if the data they use isn’t accurate, their efforts won’t be successful.
So, before you make a big mess and jeopardize not only your outreach but also your online reputation, let’s discuss some data hygiene best practices and how to implement them.
When Data Goes Rogue
Dirty data, aka rogue data, is a term used to describe inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that having the wrong phone number can be an obstacle that will keep you from reaching a particular person.
Now imagine what happens in the business world: every year, thousands of people change jobs and phone numbers, get married or divorced, move, and their lives take all kinds of different directions.
Surveys have shown that, on average, people change 12 jobs during their lifetime.
Additional challenges and considerations
Outdated and incorrect data can have a significant impact on your deliverability and response rates, not to mention how much time you will waste trying to trace a prospect.
As you can see, B2B data decays at a very fast pace, and if you fail to keep track of these changes, you’ll find yourself among a number of organizations that leverage inaccurate marketing/customer data.
Why Is Dirty Data Dangerous? Stats show that data decays at a rate of 30% a year and becomes outdated.
That’s bad because of the following:
1. You’ll waste your time and money
The cost of bad data in the U.S. alone is $3.1 trillion annually, while individual organizations can lose $9.7 million per year.
The latest reports show that your sales and marketing departments lose approximately 546 hours annually due to the use of bad data. In other words, every rep wastes 27.3% of their time.
So, basically, your team tries to nurture half-baked, lukewarm leads instead of spending their time effectively and engaging high-quality leads.
Needless to say, this is frustrating for your sales reps, as they’re trying hard to close deals and fail due to the lack of valuable data.
2. Your churn rate will soar
If you notice that you’re bleeding subscribers who leave your newsletter list after a certain period of time, bad data is to blame.
There are two kinds of churn, and both are related to bad data.
- The first one is transparent, and it refers to unsubscribes, hard bounces, and spam complaints – all those can be the result of the fact that you’re sending irrelevant emails that annoy your recipients.
- The second type is significantly less obvious – these prospects churn simply because they can’t see your emails as they end up in the spam folder or they don’t use that email address anymore.
It’s clear that data decay can ruin your email campaigns.
3. Your emails won’t be properly tailored
Naturally, if you don’t have accurate information about your prospects, you won’t be aware that Jack, the marketing manager of the company, has been promoted and that the content you’re sending him doesn’t fit the bill anymore.
Also, if you’ve bought a list on the internet (we strongly advise against this practice!), you might email your prospect and greet them with “Hello Sean,” which won’t be a problem unless the guy’s name is actually Shawn.
You get the picture.
4. You can get blacklisted
All the previously mentioned consequences of using dirty data are bad, but this one is the worst.
Bear with me because this is pretty important to remember. Almost 46.8% of all emails sent on a daily basis can be classified as spam, and blacklists exist in order to prevent all that irrelevant content from flooding people’s inboxes.
How do spam filters work?
Email service providers do their best to stop ruthless spammers, and they use so-called honeypot traps – dormant or now-defunct email accounts.
Accounts that haven’t been used for a long time are disabled, and those who send emails to such accounts have enough time to notice that a particular account is unresponsive and eliminate it from their list.
However, if a sender doesn’t do that, a honey trap activates.
Honey traps are actually re-activated defunct email addresses used for the purposes of catching spammers.
Their job is to draw the attention of the ESP to suspicious behaviors.
The ESP, in turn, concludes that the person sending all those emails after getting hard bounces constantly must be a spammer who doesn’t perform regular list hygiene.
And just like that – you can get blacklisted. In other words, your every email will end up in spam.
The worst-case scenario
But, again, that’s not the worst thing.
If you’re not careful and if your data is outdated and corrupt, you can even burn your domain!
In that case, you won’t be able to use it ever again, and all your correspondence and campaigns will be lost.
Even though you’re a legitimate sender!
Yes, that’s not fair, but you have to take some measures of precaution.
Read more on how to protect your domain from this irreversible damage.
5. You won’t have an accurate insight into your funnel
If you don’t regularly check your database, you won’t have an insight into the quality and health of your funnel.
How many qualified leads are there?
How many stale contacts are trying to nurture pointlessly?
Who makes up your customer base?
What leads should you disqualify?
You’ll get the answers to all these questions once you clean your database.
Benefits of Data Hygiene
It’s obvious that you need to review and clean your list on a regular basis.
Although this will surely shrink your funnel, there’s no need to worry about it – you’ll be better off with a decimated email list filled with high-quality leads interested in your content and offers than a huge list of contacts that don’t even open your emails.
Other benefits of keeping your database clean include the following.
1. Improved email deliverability
You won’t have to worry whether your email reached the intended recipients.
A great deliverability rate, in turn, vouches for you in the sense that you won’t be flagged as a spammer by your ESP.
2. Better open and click rates
The fact that you’re sending your emails only to people who are interested in your offer will boost your open and click rates.
This also means that your emails won’t be marked as spam, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how effective your outreach is.
3. Reduced costs
Certain ESPs charge you based on the number of emails you send or the number of subscribers you have.
By keeping your list clean, you can slash this price and save some money instead of wasting it on those who aren’t interested in your emails anyway.
4. Accurate analytics
The importance of data analytics in marketing is undeniable. Marketers heavily rely on various metrics, and if your data is dirty, then your campaign analytics will be off the mark.
Here’s how:
- By reaching out to prospects who don’t want to receive your messages, you’ll be faced with spam complaints and disengaged, unresponsive contacts who apparently aren’t your target audience.
- Another problem might be emailing the same person with the same message, which is annoying and may prompt them to unsubscribe.
As a result, your A/B tests won’t return accurate results, and, basically, all your efforts will be based on shaky foundations.
If your data is clean, you will be able to analyze your marketing efforts using the right sample and get relevant stats about how your campaigns are performing. In addition to this, it’s crucial to implement an ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) data pipeline to ensure that data is efficiently extracted from various sources, loaded into your databases, and transformed into a usable format.
How to keep your list clean
After we’ve covered the bad things that can happen if you use bad data and the benefits of maintaining regular data hygiene, let’s see what you can do to be in your prospects’ and ESP’s good books.
1. Standardize your data at the point of entry
Even if you’re regularly scrubbing your data and eliminating inactive contacts, merging the duplicates, and completing the missing entries, your sales data hygiene won’t be properly maintained if you let bad data into your CRM, especially when it comes to data entry jobs.
So, make sure to standardize the way new data enters your database, meaning that a uniform standard operating procedure should be followed.
What does this mean in practice?
This basically means that your reps and whoever is entering the new data should check all the required fields – name, last name, company, title, job – and include only data entries that are complete and accurate.
This point-of-entry check-up will help you let only relevant, high-quality data in your database, as well as prevent duplicates and mistakes. So, the Shawn/Sean or Mark/Marc or Cathy/Kathy incident won’t happen.
Complicated and time-consuming?
You bet.
But our next tip can help you with that.
2. Establish data governance
Establishing robust data governance is equally crucial to ensure your data’s integrity and security. Utilizing data integration tools can be a key part of this process, helping you seamlessly integrate and manage data across various systems while maintaining high standards of data quality and compliance.
This concept refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data your organization collects, stores, and uses. Here’s why it’s essential and how you can implement it.
- Define data stewardship roles. Assign data stewards, who are employees responsible for setting data standards and policies, ensuring data quality, and resolving data issues. This role is pivotal in maintaining a clean and organized database, ensuring that everyone in the organization understands their part in data management.
- Develop a data governance framework. Create a set of guidelines that define who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, and using what methods. This framework should cover how data is collected, stored, accessed, and maintained. Implementing such a framework helps prevent data leaks and security incidents and ensures systematic control over data management practices through well-defined Incident Response Playbooks.
- Continuous education and training. Regular training sessions for all employees on the importance of data governance, understanding the organization’s data policies, and the correct handling of data are crucial. These sessions help to mitigate risks associated with data mismanagement and ensure a uniform approach to data handling across the company.
3. Use the Autoklose B2B Database
Instead of doing all the heavy lifting manually, on your own, you can sign up for Autoklose and get access to our impeccably clean and regularly updated database, with millions of high-quality B2B leads.
Our team of data analysts makes sure that every single piece of information is accurate as well as that every contact is complete.
All these leads are thoroughly scrubbed and verified so that you can be sure your every email will not only reach the intended recipient but also that the recipient in question is relevant to your industry and offer.
What’s even better, you can pick the leads you want based on a number of different parameters, including location, title, job level, industry, company size, revenue, etc., and send tailored campaigns.
You can also import your own lists and integrate Autoklose with different CRMs without the fear of duplicate contacts.
3. Stay compliant with data privacy regulations
You’ve probably heard about GDPR and the CAN-SPAM Act, both of which try to protect email recipients from receiving unsolicited marketing messages and emails.
The former applies to Europe, while the latter refers to the U.S., meaning that if you’re doing business with these regions and countries, you need to bear this in mind if you don’t want to be penalized for sending a campaign without obtaining explicit consent from your recipients. Implementing effective consent management is crucial no matter where you operate your business.
Tips for ensuring compliance
- Append your contact information and find out where every individual prospect comes from to ensure that you comply with these legal regulations and avoid hefty fines.
- Evaluate the systems your company relies on for obtaining information.
- Stop amassing irrelevant bits of data, as this carries a big risk of collecting dirty data. Stick only to what can help you improve your sales conversations and provide a personalized approach to customer interactions.
- Re-evaluate all the forms and platforms you use for generating leads and ask for sensitive or detailed information during the later stages of your sales process. Double-check what fields are necessary for the initial contact.
- Use an email archiving solution to protect your customers’ and business partners’ sensitive information contained in your emails. Keep your inbox free from clutter and move important messages to a safe location where they will be protected and easily accessible. It’s crucial to find an email archiving solution that provides full regulatory compliance with strict data protection protocols.
4. Perform regular data audits
And I don’t mean just checking whether your existing data is up-to-date and complete – you need to assess your data hygiene plan.
When it comes to verifying your data and appending it, it’s worth mentioning that Autoklose has a feature that will help you with that: AutoVerify.
What is data verification and how does it work?
It basically allows you to scrub and verify your email list automatically and make sure whether it’s safe to send a campaign to a particular email address.
Autoklose uses different validation techniques and our proprietary algorithms during this process. All you have to do is select email addresses that you’d like to validate, pay as you go, and receive an email with detailed results of the validation process.
In case a certain address has been identified as invalid will be moved to the Do Not Email list.
Also, if some of these addresses are in an active campaign, they will also be removed from the campaign and added to the Do Not Email list automatically.
As a result, your email deliverability and sender reputation will be improved, while your bounce rate will drop.
Closing Words
The conclusion is that bad data is pretty expensive, not only in terms of time and money. It’s also your reputation that you put on the line, and that’s something that can cost you a lot if you’re using dirty sales data. Use these data hygiene best practices to keep your database clean and compliant with all the data privacy regulations.
