One of the most essential pieces
in the marketing puzzle is making sure that you have clean data. I'm sure I don't have to reiterate all the
reasons, but having clean data means that you accurately know what's happening
with your prospect, leads, customers, competitors, partners, and anyone else in
your system. You can contact them appropriately and more importantly, it
ensures that you don't accidentally send them the wrong information.
The first step to keeping quality
data is to review all your contacts BEFORE initiallyenteringthem into your
marketing automation system and/or CRM.
If they start out clean, you can start segmenting right off the bat. Unfortunately, for most companies even the
initial review process can be challenging.
This is usually due to collecting data from many different sources and
softwares that all have different formats.
The other reason is that most of you reading this entry probably already
have a system in place.
Therefore, I HIGHLY suggest
enlisting a
data cleansing service. Each
service has their own pros and cons, but the investment will quickly display
its worth within the first few cleanses.
I don't know if you've spent time going through thousands and thousands
of excel entries, but it can be VERY tedious and also has room for error. Having someone else take care of that for you
saves on added stress alone! And we all
know that even technology experiences mistakes from time to time. Marketing automation and CRM systems are
designed to work with multiple third party programs, and because of this, often
times data naturally becomes duplicated in the system or imported
incorrectly. Even if the systems say
they de-dup or match emails, dirty data
is inevitable. Plus, you are receiving
website traffic, form registrations, email preferences, and more. Due to all this, my other suggestion is to
use a cleansing service regularly. A
quarterly data cleanse will do wonders for your marketing programs, and will
make your sales team very happy!
Article From: web.bluebirdstrat.com
