The Importance of Data Cleansing

Is your data holding you back?

As marketers and sales professionals we amass a vast amount of data. We also analyse everything, from the ROI of a particular marketing campaign, to maintaining vast amounts of personal data we have collected to contact our leads, prospects and clients – both past and present.

There is a simple truth: “we are only as effective as the data we collect and manage”. We have all felt the frustration of trying to get through to prospects and contacts to discover they have moved on or, worse still, that the contact details are incorrect.

For small data sets it is a relatively simple job of keeping on top of this. Sales and marketing teams can update the information as and when they communicate with prospects and clients.

But how you do manage this task for large data sets (those with thousands of records)?

100 records or so can be updated by one motivated internal team, but maintaining this enthusiasm and efficiency for large data sets can be difficult and unrewarding.

A dedicated data cleansing service that calls, verifies and updates your data sets in a far more efficient manner will leave you with data you can work with.

But why is data cleansing important?

Data ages quickly

The quality of your data can deteriorate quite quickly, just how fast depends on the markets you target.

Staff move on

We all change jobs. This is a simple fact and can happen quite quickly.

Companies change location

Whilst this is less likely for established businesses, young companies may have to move location to meet the natural needs of their growth.

Businesses can close

This is something that none of us like to hear about but unfortunately it happens.

Rebranding

Companies can and do rebrand. This can lead to a change of web or email address and in some cases phone number and location.

Poor data: poor leads

Poor quality data can simply lead to poor quality leads that may be hard to convert.

Missed opportunities

Data accuracy is key to ensuring that you maximise every opportunity available to you. For example, when working with a database containing 10,000 contacts with emails and phone numbers, if 10% of these are no longer valid, you would miss out on a 1000 potential leads.

Speaking with my colleagues in our sister company Really B2B, I have heard of instances where the email attrition rate is as high as 40 or 50%.

Low conversion rates

Segmented targeting within marketing campaigns has always proved to deliver the best conversion rates. But if you are missing this key information it can be hard to ensure you are delivering the message to the right prospect at the right time.

Harder to close

As we mentioned previously, poor data potentially means poor quality leads. This has the knock on effect of making it harder for the sales teams to convert the lead into business, and this can also have the effect of lowering the lifetime value of the clients.

Data protection

Data protection is being debated at EU level. From 2016 we could see an end to paid/bought data with all companies having to prove that all marketing lists are legitimate and all members of those databases have opted in.

By running a data cleansing campaign you can have a recording of the phone call asking if they wish to still receive future communications.

Contact us to see how we can help your business

Tags: data, data cleansing, Lead Generation, Telemarketing