The Impact of Data Cleansing and Validation on your Marketing Efforts

Successful lead conversion requires accurate lead lists. Building and maintaining this list is very tough, since data decays at a very high rate due to missing data, duplicate records, outdated contact details etc. This leads to irrelevant communication with your audience, through channels like email messaging, and can turn away potential customers. It can lead to audiences unsubscribing or even a possible blacklisting of the domain, and consequently lowering your sales. Therefore you need to have a clean and updated B2B database, to be able to gain more subscribers and deliver personalized and relevant communication to your customers.

However, managing information or data has always been a daunting task for organizations, mostly when it is siloed all over the corporate network. Marketing and Sales databases are often filled with incorrect and out-of-date information for the sake of volume. This brings us to the most important task within data management, which is keeping your marketing and sales information updated in real time.

What is Data Cleansing, Validation, Enrichment and Verification within a CRM system?

Data Cleansing or data Scrubbing or data Validation refers to identifying corrupt data, deleting and updating it, and having an organizational level overview for data management.

In more specific terms, it is a way to identify invalid and non-deliverable email addresses, and other details within a contact’s information and verify legitimate details, giving marketers the ability to improve their delivery and engagement. Such validation is highly useful when conducted on a lead list so that valid sales leads are separated from other contacts obtained through your marketing campaigns.

Data Enrichment is the process of appending or enhancing collected data with relevant context obtained from additional sources. It refers to gathering missing information from various online sources, and filling in this information into the database. It also involves cross Validation of collected data through various methods like research triangulation, and email id checks, to confirm and verify if the collected information is completely accurate.

Why are they necessary?

Bad data impacts every aspect of a business, from lead generation, to customer relationships, and revenue. Bad data is costly. People move, relocate, or change jobs and it is difficult for companies to track this movement. If you use a poor-quality list for marketing and sales, you could unintentionally be starting out with a high miss rate, right at the start. This ultimately leads to delay in sales engagements and hinders opportunities. With inaccurate or incomplete data you inevitably lose prospects and risk customers turning to your competitors.

Benefits of Data Validation: Leveraging ROI from the start

1. Prevent time wastage
Invalid emails impact delivery. Incorrect phone numbers or unqualified leads waste sales time. Data validation saves your business both time and money. Moreover, this reduction in sales prospecting time shortens your sales cycle.
2. More accurate results
Separating low-quality email addresses from high-value contacts helps you increase conversion rates on your campaigns. Generating high quality and relevant data ensures you reach the most perfect business audience that can have a direct impact on your results.
3. Better use of marketing budget
You retain great savings on resources from not pursuing the wrong prospects. This allows you to allocate your budget on resources you are confident will succeed.

A clean database will yield benefits for a team and the whole organization as well. Some of the major benefits include

• Minimal human error even when dealing with large databases, multiple teams and data sources.
• Improvement in the quality of your leads.
• A healthy database allows you to conduct better analysis and decision making.
• It allows you to be compliant with data protection norms like GDPR, since adhering to these norms is very important from a data privacy point of view.
• A clean and updated database allows for better customer segmentation, enabling you to categorise your audience into groups, on the basis of how likely they are to buy.
• When you understand who your customers are, you can target them with more relevant offers, leading to personalised email messaging.
• This will enable all of the interactions with your customers to be better because you have better data on them, thus improving the overall customer experience.

Lastly, it is very important for an organisation to have a Chief Data Officer or similar role to be accountable for checking on the status of data updation and cleansing. Even within the marketing and sales teams, responsibility should be assigned for proper database management, to make sure the database is updated at least on a weekly basis, either in house or with externally outsourced support. 

If your organisation has never begun with this process, it’s never too late to get started. Make sure you begin with a thorough data audit to discover weak areas within your database, that can then be rectified through the processes of cleansing, validation and enrichment.