When it comes to building a business, high quality data is key. For any marketing campaign to be successful, it is imperative to have accurate, clean, and reliable data.
Yet data is unique – it decays with time.
Globally, Gartner estimates that 3% of data decays every month, and a staggering 70% of B2B customer data decays every year.
Business owners lose on average £10.4 million annually due to poor data quality, according to Gartner.
Marketers looking at inaccurate or outdated information struggle to roll out marketing campaigns effectively, and are likely to lose revenue as a result.
A B2B data cleaning service provider is therefore crucial to maintaining high quality, clean data.
Data cleansing: what does it mean?
The data cleansing process addresses a wide range of data management errors, such as duplicate data, incomplete, incompatible, and irrelevant data.
Many of these problems are due to mistakes made during data entry, while others are caused by variations in data structures, data types, and the terminology used by different departments.
There are six dimensions of data quality that should be addressed during the data cleaning process:
- Completeness – is all necessary data included (no missing values)?
- Consistency – does information stored in one place match the same data entry in another?
- Uniqueness – indicates whether it is a single record (i.e. there are no duplicate records within the data set)
- Validity – does all the data follow predefined standards?
- Accuracy – measuring how accurate data is
- Timeliness – how accurate is your data from the point in time required?
These are 4 ways data cleansing can increase your business’s efficiency and reduce costs.
1. Make sure your messages are seen
Your company’s marketing efforts should demonstrate your competence and experience.
In the event that your communications contain inaccurate information, or never reach your target audiences, this can affect your brand’s image and make prospects and customers see you as less professional.
Cleansing data ensures that the addresses in your marketing dataset are up-to-date and are formatted correctly – helping your communications convey the right image.
2. Makes email campaigns more effective
It is surprisingly common for businesses to lack proper data verification and send out email marketing campaigns using out-of-date contact information.
This leads to wasting money with no real return on investment.
Bad data or incorrect data, means that marketers send emails to people who are not relevant to them or who aren’t interested in their products. In addition to looking unprofessional, email providers look out for this, and can end up marking these emails as spam, damaging your sender reputation in the process.
With B2B data cleansing, you make sure you’re targeting the right people, using the correct contact information. By increasing reach and improving open rates, it plays a vital role in determining campaign success.
3. Consistency between marketing, sales, and customer service
Most companies have common databases that are used by their sales, marketing, and customer service teams. To ensure that the right messages go to the right prospects at the right time, you want to make sure everybody has the same information at hand.
Many companies’ data is not aligned between teams. As a result, they are missing out on critical context that can help them better understand a customer.
It helps everyone improve their work if they have a comprehensive picture of a prospect or customer, how they can be reached and what they do within their own business
4. Streamlining the sales process
B2B marketers prefer account-based marketing because it allows them to shorten the sales cycle.
The nurturing process is more successful if the marketer has quality data.
When you give misleading information or contact the wrong people with your offers, it can make you look unprofessional. In addition, dirty data can have far-reaching consequences on your entire business if you don’t catch it and fix it in a timely manner.
Using More Than Words Marketing’s data enhancement service, your sales and marketing teams can convert and sell more effectively
We would be happy to discuss your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases, and let you know what we can do to bring them up to date. We’re available on 0330 010 8300
