What is Data Hygiene & Why Does It Matter?
Data hygiene is the ongoing practice of removing bad data, including any information that contains errors and standardizing data for postal discounts. If information is outdated, duplicated, or incorrect, it needs to be removed and updated. This is one of the best ways to improve your Return on Investment (ROI). Businesses that use and rely on a CRM for lead nurturing and customer segmentation are being negatively affected by poor data hygiene. While 67% of businesses use CRM data for customer targeting, 60% believe that their overall data health is unreliable.
If you choose to ignore data hygiene and use data with errors, you might experience problems including low ROI, long sales cycles, misguided decision making, and a lack of success in your marketing campaigns. Moreover, according to an IBM survey, more than 30% of business leaders are not confident with the data they’re using to make key business decisions, while 27% of respondents are uncertain.
How to Improve ROI with Data Hygiene
Data drives revenue. Of course, the products or services you offer, your website, and marketing campaigns all matter too. But the data you possess is one of the most important assets in your business! It’s how you keep in contact with your customers and connect with prospects. Your main goal should be to collect accurate customer data. Most of what you invest (time, money, and resources) goes toward building a data set that creates results in your marketing campaigns.
Implementing data hygiene best practices isn’t something you’ll be able to do once and forget about. It’s an ongoing, evolving process, just like your data list itself. Data hygiene will increase your ROI, but only when you manage it on a regular basis.
The Elements of Good Data Hygiene
To maintain good data hygiene you’ll need to focus on two areas. First, you’ll need to identify where there are errors in your data. This could be incomplete, inaccurate, or irrelevant data. Then, you’ll need to either complete, correct, delete, or modify the data with those errors.
When you use data hygiene to improve your email list, you’ll notice benefits in a number of key areas, such as improved delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and lower bounce rates. The goal s to see better engagement, which in turn improves your revenue. Simply put, regularly conducting data hygiene helps you increase your ROI!
Data Hygiene Best Practices to Implement Now
Now that you know how important data hygiene is, let’s review a few of the most important data hygiene best practices.
Be Proactive & Try Data Enrichment
Take a proactive approach to data hygiene and transform pieces of information (like emails or phone numbers) into complete customer profiles. Use data enrichment to optimize your sales data, reach new customers, and complete competitive analyses.
You need to refresh and optimize your database by updating the contact information you’ve collected from your customers. This could be through modifying, replacing, deleting, or even correcting the information when needed.
Exact Data uses data enrichment to refresh an organization's database by adding missing or incomplete data, merging duplicate records, and removing outdated information. Our email and postal addresses are routinely run through a rigorous data hygiene process to make certain all selects, new movers, new addresses, invalid email addresses, and deaths are unerring and up-to-date. Proper data enrichment expands your reach, increases your deliverability, boosts your ROI, and saves your business money by not wasting valuable resources, allowing you to make better business decisions.
Update Data You’ve Collected
To implement data hygiene best practices, you need to update your list on a regular basis. First, collect standardized data from all of your customers. Then, validate your current database by double-checking to make sure everything is correct, complete, and relevant. Identify and delete any duplicate information. Finally, append the data that you already have by adding supplemental information.
When you’ve located spots where data is missing, add updated information to those contacts. A data append service allows you to optimize your list. This will significantly increase your deliverability rate, reactivate past customers, enhance your data, and give you the ability to make contact with new customers. There are a few types of append services like email appends, business and consumer phone appends, and cell phone appends. You can also add social media profile information and even go backward, adding names, emails, and addresses to existing phone number data.
Exact Data’s team of data experts are standing by to consult with you to help enhance your data. If you have questions about graduating from an outdated list and receiving modernized contacts, we’re here to help. Implementing data hygiene best practices is one of the best ways to improve ROI for your business. When you choose to update your list, you’re focusing on boosting engagement and revenue. The key is to do this consistently! You’re going to be amazed at the results you get when you learn how to improve ROI with data hygiene.
