How Data cleansing and data enrichment can help you turn your database into a powerful sales and marketing tool

Most companies rely on a database of prospects or customers that serves as a backbone for marketing and sales activities. The performance of your campaign depends on the quality of your contacts. Stale data, missing details and duplicate records only prevent your messages from reaching the intended target audience. You end up with bounced emails, or emails getting caught in spam filters. Secondly, the lower the relevancy of prospects, the lower the email open rates. This tells us that everything depends on having a clean and updated database, and this is why databases are always in need of maintenance, cleaning and updating.

Sources of bad data:

No CRM database is free from bad or incomplete data. It can begin right at the time of manual data entry, inbound forms that have just an email address, or manual uploads from your team that’s doing prospecting manually, or from an event sign up list. Lastly, if you buy a dataset online, it may take quite some time to sync all the fields into your CRM, or set up additional fields, so that data can match. So what people often end up doing is not loading in some important fields into their CRM like company size, headquarters’ location etc. which could be valuable somewhere down the line. So lazy data loading from purchased databases is another source of incomplete data, just as manual data entry from the sales team.

Data enrichment gives you a full 360 degree view of each contact’s details, which allows you to send out highly targeted marketing advertising and sales outreach messages. It gives you vital information about a lead, which includes information like industry, sector, company size, revenue, website, demographic details like age, gender, email ID, phone number, location, and skills, contact name, job title (e.g. CEO, head of sales, director), Department (e.g. accounting, general management, marketing) and email address, phone number, tenure, and may other sales intelligence triggers and news events.

Turning your CRM database into a powerful marketing and sales tool:

Saving time and resources:

Firstly, it allows you to reach out to leads that are highly qualified. Eg. if 25% of your data is inaccurate or incomplete, your sales and marketing teams waste 25% of their time working with stale and incomplete data. This time and effort is saved when you have a clean database.

Save your email from spam filters:

The biggest downside to an outdated list is its effect on the emails you send in your campaign. If the contacts on your list have not given explicit consent to be contacted, your emails risk being caught in spam filters. This prevents your emails from reaching the intended audience. But an enriched list has accurate details, and hence never ends up in spam folders.

Low bounced emails and high open rate:

Just like spam filters prevent your email from being read, bounced emails and unopened emails have the same negative impact. The reason is a high number of unqualified leads. The solution to this is high accuracy and relevancy of contact data which comes from refreshed databases.

Higher ROI through Intelligence Signals:

Data can also be enriched with marketing and sales intelligence. News events, press releases, mergers and acquisitions are insights that help you conduct more intelligent and effective outreach activities. Deeper insight into your leads also gives you a better opportunity for segmentation of leads, creating accurate buyer personas, and personalisation of your messages. These additional layers of insight result in higher ROI on your campaigns.

With these factors in place your CRM database is turned into a powerful tool for marketing, sales, cold calling or EDM campaigns.