Every business relies on quality prospect data in order to effectively build sales, so it’s important that your data stays up-to-date and relevant. Storing old data and sending out marketing material to old addresses and to people who no longer hold a position you have them listed for, can potentially harm your brand image not to mention customer perception.
Cleansing your database regularly will both improve accuracy and deliver a greater return on investment for your marketing efforts. A recent study by Sirius Decisions*found that between 10% and 25% of customer and prospect data held in databases contained serious inaccuracies.
By making a commitment to using focused, relevant data at all times, you’ll be increasing the chances of campaign success for your business.
3 Effective Data Capture Habits
1. Email Verification
Implementing a validation process to verify email addresses is well worth the effort – and it doesn’t need to be done manually. Your business could include an email verification step into a form submission process whereby you prompt the user to confirm their email address before they hit submit and their record makes it into your database.
2. Implement Drop Down Lists
You will often have standard entries for some of the fields in your database e.g. job title, industry sector, state. Whilst this information stays fairly constant, spelling mistakes could prevent you reporting accurately on your database. Think about putting in drop down lists or some standard abbreviations to ensure accuracy and consistency with your data entries.
3. Check For Duplicates
Duplicate records can be a real headache when it comes to managing your database. It’s important to have a process in place for cross checking your database for duplicate records and merging any duplicates to ensure information is relevant and up-to-date.
Your database can be one of your most valuable business assets, but only if it contains quality data. Keeping your database cleansed might be labour intensive but the efforts will be totally worthwhile for your business, adding significant value to your marketing efforts as well as the understanding of customers and prospects.
* http://hosted.adestra.com/adestra/files/Bad%20Data%20Impact%20On%20Demand%20Gen.pdf
