Six Steps to Taking Care of Your Dirty Data Issues

“I don’t want to embarrass you, but something stinks and I’m pretty sure it’s coming from your database.”

Sure, no one likes to be told their data hygiene for marketing is foul, but one thing is certain: the friend who has the courage to tell you that you’ve got some funk going on is far better than the “friends” who let your data go on repelling your customers. The good news is getting your data ready to rock is a simple and painless process. Below, we’ve outlined six steps you can take now to ensure your data ditches its dirty reputation and delivers the kind of quality that smells like sweet success.

1. Give Your Data a Good Scrub

In order to keep current customers in the loop, you need to regularly check to make sure their contact info is accurate. If it’s been a while since you’ve verified existing customer data, it’s time to do a batch cleanse of your database. A one-time batch cleanse is a quick and easy way to verify emails, addresses and phone numbers, and ensure your messages are reaching customers.

DO IT: Approximately 30% of contact lists become outdated every three months, so validate and append your database every quarter with an integrated tool that provides data enrichment for Marketo, Eloqua and other marketing automation platforms (MAPs).

2. Get the Truth – Every Time

Collecting accurate contact data is vital to the success of your marketing efforts, as well as the digital and mobile experiences of your customers. To make sure you get the right info the first time, use real-time verification. Convenient and user-friendly, real-time verification ensures the data customers provide is correct. More importantly, its intuitive type-down feature speeds up the process for customers by auto-populating forms, which enhances their experience and makes it simple for them to give you what you want immediately.

DO IT: Increase your data accuracy by adding real-time verification to all forms and information-gathering efforts throughout your site.

3. Let’s Get Richer

Once you have accurate contact information, you can make your marketing efforts even more engaging through data enrichment. Data enrichment allows you to append additional attributes to a customer’s existing information. For example, if you want to simplify the sign-up process for your loyalty program, you can offer a text-to-enroll option and then append the other information you need (email, mailing address, etc.). More importantly, richer data leads to better customer insights and more targeted marketing campaigns.

DO IT: Adding data enrichment to Marketo, Eloqua or other MAPs and Customer Relationship Management (CRMs) systems will allow you to continuously build and maintain a better database.

4. Connect the Data

If you’ve cleaned and enriched the data in your department, you’ve effectively won half the battle. However, if your database is one of several siloed databases throughout your company, the war is far from over. Nowadays, it is essential to connect all databases in an enterprise in order to provide a central source for viewing and managing data. Once data is connected, it’s much easier to share insights with leadership, deliver a holistic customer experience, and make decisions that are truly informed.

DO IT:  Managing data from multiple sources across a company can be done quickly with cloud-based solutions, that use a data dashboard to centralize data, reveal actionable insights and enhance data management for Eloqua and other MAPs..

5. Make It Personal

One of the biggest advantages of clean, quality data is the ability to translate individual insights into highly targeted messages that resonate with customers’ unique tastes, attracting their attention and business. To do this, you need a database that allows you to segment customers by demographics, psychographics, and behavioral data, including past purchases. Armed with this information, you can create individualized marketing campaigns that address customers in ways that reflect their preferences and buying behaviors and make them feel personally valued.

DO IT: Campaigns featuring data-driven personalization deliver up to eight times the ROI on marketing spend. Adding a data dashboard to your MAP or CRM enables you to track campaign performance.

6. Settle the Score

You know who gets ahead of the competition? Leaders who know where they’ve been and where they are going. When your data is clean, connected and centralized, you can measure and set a benchmark for a lot of cool things like the quality of your data, your ability to identify and market to your ideal customers, the success of your campaigns across channels, emerging trends, etc. In the past, this intel took a team of analysts and several weeks to gather, but nowadays you can lay hold of these golden insights whenever you want simply by connecting your database to a modern cloud-based data management tool.

DO IT: At Sureshot, we’ve seen firsthand how clean and enriched data drives dramatic B2B results for our customers. To see for yourself, do an exciting, no-pressure demo of Command, today.