Your business’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform is the lifeblood of your sales and marketing efforts and data is the fuel that drives it. So if you’re taking chances with outdated and incorrect contact information, it’s highly likely your marketing efforts won’t bear optimal results and your sales forecasts may become skewed.
Data cleansing is the best solution to preventing this and ensuring you are always using accurate information that is in line with your marketing strategies.
By cleansing your data or having someone else do it for you, you’re not just decluttering the whole system and making sure everything’s organised – you’re also improving your marketing channels to communicate better with customers. Let’s dive in and learn more about data cleansing and why it’s crucial for helping you reach your targets correctly.
What Is Data Cleansing?
Data cleansing, also known as data scrubbing or data cleaning, is a systematic process of fixing or eliminating inaccurate, duplicate, wrongly formatted, or incomplete data within a data set. You typically begin this process by identifying any errors that exist and then make updates to the affected data to remove the errors successfully.
Data cleansing is meant to improve data quality to ensure that users utilise information that is more accurate, consistent, and reliable when making decisions. When cleaning customer contact data, you should consider using verification and data enrichment tools like Trestle’s Phone Verification API and their Reverse Phone API which is available as a Twilio verification api add-on to enhance the correctness and completeness of your data further.
Why Is Clean Contact Data Important in a Business?
Maintaining clean contact data goes beyond just being a good practice for getting things right in your business. It can enhance your chances of success by a great margin since you’re relying on high-quality information to formulate your sales and marketing strategies.
With accurate information, you can be sure every message will reach the intended recipient on their preferred channel, and as a result, increase engagement rates and prevent resource wastage.
Additionally, clean data is crucial when you want to segment and personalise your marketing efforts since the information about individuals will be more accurate. As long as you are using reliable data, it will help you foster better relationships with your customers and power engagements that will result in increased sales.
Here are four summary points on why clean data is crucial for your business:
(i). Promotes effective customer interactions through timely and relevant messages.
(ii). Minimises errors in automated communication systems.
(iii). Enhances response rates since messages will be sent to valid phone numbers.
(iv). Supports your compliance with data protection regulations, enabling you to avoid unnecessary legal issues.
How Does Contact Data Become Corrupted?
The one terrifying fact about contact data corruption is that it often happens subtly making it easy to miss. However, continuous corruption leads to significant issues resulting in a less-reliable CRM. The widespread sources of data corruption are:
- Human Error – Simple human error-based mistakes like incorrect data entry are the leading cause of errors in data sets. A good example is when a customer inputs their email with a “.gmal.com” extension instead of “.gmail.com”. Even if you were to scan each new contact for errors manually, it’s quite easy to miss such subtle mistakes.
- System Migrations – The process of transferring data from an old CRM system to a new one is often delicate, and a single mistake can cause data misalignment or formatting errors.
- Data Decay – It’s not uncommon for contact information to change after some time. This is all thanks to people moving to new addresses, changing their phone numbers, or switching jobs. When this happens, the previously collected data becomes inaccurate, and consequently irrelevant.
- Duplicate Data Entries – It’s easy to enter the same contact multiple times especially if using different formats. This can be a major cause of confusion and inefficiency in handling communications. Even without resorting to data cleansing, you should leverage effective measures for data duplication avoidance by leveraging key contact identifiers.
What Steps Should You Take to Cleanse Contact Data the Right Way?
When planning a contact data cleansing project, here are the key steps you never want to miss:
1. Identification and removal of duplicate data
Duplicate data is simply not supposed to exist in your system, so you don’t even need second thoughts here. You can use automated tools to detect and merge duplicates based on key identifiers in contact information such as phone numbers or email addresses. You can review and merge duplicates manually for complex cases where automated removal isn’t an option.
Even after successfully removing all duplicate information, it’s important to implement a regular deduplication policy that ensures regular checking and removal of duplicate data when a predefined threshold is met.
2. Repair of Inconsistent or Erroneous Data
Another common cause for low-quality data is erroneous and inconsistent data like incorrect job titles or misspelt names. Your first step here would be to implement validation systems that check for common misspelling errors and other issues during data entry.
Secondly, train your team adequately to ensure they understand the importance of data accuracy and the errors they should look out for. Finally, you will want to audit your data regularly to identify and correct inconsistencies.
3. Updating of Outdated Information
As mentioned earlier, data decay is normal as people make certain changes in their lives. Data that was previously associated with their profiles becomes obsolete and your best bet is to update such data.
To solve this issue, you can establish data verification and update routines after specified intervals. You should also encourage your contacts to update their information so they never miss out on important updates or offers. Where applicable, you can even integrate your CRM with services that offer real-time updates to contact data.
4. Standardisation of Data Formats
Standardising data formats across your business systems will help a lot with avoiding issues such as misalignment or miscategorization. As you go through the data cleansing process, you should define formats for phone numbers, dates, and currency to ensure they are uniform across your business processes.
Also, make sure to leverage dropdown menus and predefined options so you don’t encounter multiple variations in data entry. You can even employ automation tools where possible to standardise the data that comes into your CRM.
To Sum Everything Up,
The only way to benefit maximally from data-driven business processes is to make sure the data you’re relying on is as clean and accurate as it can be. Thankfully, there are enough data validation tools and other automated tools that can simplify your data cleansing processes and support your contact data management efforts.
Also conducting regular data audits and establishing appropriate data entry standards will help a lot with maintaining clean data that you can rely on at all times to inform your sales and marketing strategies.
