Unlocking Marketing Gold: The Crucial Role of Data Cleansing in Modern Business

Data is the new gold. And most modern marketers and business leaders would agree. Regular housekeeping helps keep the house clean. In the same way, businesses also require regular housekeeping – especially when it comes to their data.

Were you aware that data decays at an average rate of 2% per month which probably indicates that around 25% of your organization’s contact data is liable to go bad every year? There are a variety of factors contributing to this.

In fact, 63% of marketers report spending more on data-driven marketing and advertising last year, and 53% said that a demand to deliver more relevant communications/be more customer-centric is among the most important factors driving their investment in data-driven marketing.

So where does data cleansing play a role in all this? What are the benefits?

First of of all, let’s note that data-driven marketing allows companies to

• Respond better to shifting customer dynamics and preferences
• Analyse trends in buyer engagement and behavior, as it relates to their brand
• Nurture leads more effectively with the intention of improving conversion rates etc.

For us to be able to leverage the date better and get more juice out of our marketing efforts, cleansing data is important. If the data you’re working with is inaccurate, your effort will not have the desired impact.

If your marketing team already feels overwhelmed with existing work, you can also outsource cleansing it a third party agency.

Data complied from the last 2 decades tells us that around 45% of all marketers hire someone external to handle data quality and enrichment.

Let’s take a quick look at the benefits of data cleansing:

1. Developing knowledge of your customer base

When researching your customers and customer side stakeholders, doing regular data cleansing becomes important. If you have the right intel on your customers, you can build higher quality relationships and find additional ways to deliver value.

Good data points will help you understand the breadth of the customer personas you’re dealing with and their overall preferences. A side benefit is that running personalized communication becomes easier.

Research shows that 90% of organizations have seen substantial uptick in their customer relationships by regularly cleansing their data – helping them run more effective customer communications and upsells.

2. Easier segmentation for running hyper personalized campaigns

If you have good breadth and depth in your audience’s data points, it is easy to segment your audience.

For example, if you are selling into a B2B market and your product is appealing to mid sized companies as well as enterprises, it would be wise to segment the campaigns and make them more tailor-made to each segment size. Security and scalability may be more attractive to the enterprise segment whereas utility and affordability would be far more attractive value propositions for mid sized companies.

Segmenting your audience datasets creates for more niche, narrow marketing campaigns into a small audience subset. It’s believed that this generates superior conversion rates as the messaging is easier to resonate with. The more targeted the messaging, the higher the probability of action.

3. Reduces data duplication and redundancy

If you are working with clean data, you can avoid duplication of efforts (for instance sending the same email twice – one to Mr. Chris and another to Chris) and other such redundancies that can cost you additional time, money and effort.

Regular de-duplication ensures that the data you’re working with is reliable and accurate.

4. Prevents inaccurate marketing

Outdated data often negatively impacts the results of an outreach campaign.

Imagine if you were to rely on a five year old list for your outreach efforts. It may still say that your target audience is driven by newspaper ads. But, what if, your target audience started preferring the digital space? Moreover, it’s likely that the emails for your target audience are no longer valid because they have switched over to new roles and new companies.

This can easily lead to inaccurate marketing and a complete waste of effort.

5. Increases ROI on email marketing

Data cleansing and scrubbing are super important for any email marketing campaign. Old datasets will invariably lead to lots of unopened and bounced emails.

Your campaign’s open rates and reply rates will be lower than expected which will in turn have a demoralizing effect on your psyche as a marketer and you will be left wondering as to why the numbers are this way.

Industry surveys say that a significant percentage of email addresses inevitably become bad over time (from 20% to 30% on average)

One of the benefits of data cleansing and scrubbing is that it keeps email list hygiene and helps you maximize ROI (in the form of revenue, click through rates, qualified leads, open rates etc) from email marketing campaigns.

Overall, the benefits are a plenty! From increased client satisfaction to more lifelong and better relationships with clients to increased ROI from your marketing campaigns, it’s evident that regular data cleansing is super important in today’s age if we want to ensure high quality marketing and lead generation.

If you’re looking for help in this area, speak to our experts today over a free consultation call they will help you dissect, analyze and build a solid data strategy to serve as the foundational piece for your marketing and sales efforts.