Best Practices for Data Hygiene

In today’s competitive market, data is the goldmine and a ticket to success. However, the biggest marketing analytics challenge faced by marketers is the quality of data at hand. It won’t be wrong to say that today’s businesses live or die based on the quality of data. Thanks to the digital-first approach that brands have adopted, the availability of data isn’t a limitation any more. It is the quality of data that decides success, and the levels of marketing automation that organizations can adopt. Quality data helps your organization guide prospects toward the bottom of the sales funnel faster and improve the bottom line.

What Is Data Hygiene?

As the term suggests, data hygiene is defined as a set of processes that improve the quality of data and make it error-free. Large volumes of data are prone to duplicate records, outdated information, and incomplete entries that hurt your brand’s overall marketing campaign. Studies show that 35% of B2B business data decays annually. Imagine the lost opportunities when the same percentage of your marketing effort goes into chasing those leads. Data hygiene cleanses your data by verifying the accuracy of the information and removing errors.

Why Does Data Hygiene Matter?

In the last few years, there has been a constant buzz around Big Data. Organizations big or small seem to be chasing this ‘Holy Grail’ to increase their footprint and leave competitors behind. While there are no two thoughts on the importance of augmenting customer information and the ‘big’ potential of Big Data, there is also an Achilles heel – bad data. In simple words, it is messy and irrelevant data integration that can lead to the wastage of precious marketing resources. It is estimated that businesses in the United States alone lose more than $13 trillion annually owing to bad data.

Data quality is thus the top priority among businesses looking to scale the ladder. As we have already stated, organizations have tons of data, and without adequate governance around data quality, this is most likely to be messy. To unlock the true potential of data, you need to clean it up regularly and enrich it with relevant customer information. This is where data hygiene plays a vital role in providing organizations with better insights into their potential customers and maximizing ROI for Businesses.

How Does Data Hygiene Help Your Campaign?

• Improves decision-making as business leaders have access to enriched data
• Updated data helps improve business processes and increase productivity
• Increases conversion rate and ROI for businesses with targeted campaigns
• Reduces wastage of precious marketing resources and improves the bottom line
• Minimizes compliance risks as mandated by GDPR and other privacy legislation

Campaign Data Hygiene Best Practices

We have already talked about data hygiene and its advantages. However, your success with data hygiene rests on adopting campaign data hygiene best practices. This not only helps in cleansing your data but also establishes rules that improve data collection and its management. Here are some of the campaign data hygiene best practices that your organization should implement –

• Data Audit

If you are aware of the problem, you can solve it! Data auditing is a tedious job, especially when it is done manually. But this effort pays well by identifying broad b2b marketing trends in data inconsistency during collection, storage, and management. When you are generating data from different touchpoints, auditing can help in dealing with inconsistency. You can leverage automated data auditing tools and save on hard labor.

• Data Standardization

The best way to deal with messy data is to prevent the mess in the first place. Data standardization can go a long way in improving the quality of your data. Your organization should define data governing principles for the collection, management, and storage of data to improve its quality. Simple steps such as proper naming conventions can reduce the mess in your data.

• Removing Duplicate Entries

Imagine sending identical emails to two email addresses belonging to the same customer or two sales reps calling the customer twice. It hurts your business reputation and can turn away a high-intent prospect. Duplicate entries are a nightmare for any organization, and they have to be dealt with using data hygiene.

• Updating Data

Not all irrelevant data is bad data. Updating old data can help in turning it relevant again. Update information such as change of phone numbers, customer addresses, etc. to make it relevant again. Failure to update this information can increase the rate of decay and result in irrelevant data turning into bad data.

• Removing Bad Data

When it is bad, simply get rid of it. There are no incentives of holding on to outdated and irrelevant data irrespective of the effort that went into collecting it. Collate data relevant to your business process and those that are important to your customers. Avoid living with the notion of this bad data becoming a ‘goldmine’ in the future.

• Periodic Data Cleansing

Data cleansing isn’t a one-time activity but a process. Your organization must set up a data cleansing schedule based on the volume of data generated, the kind of business you are in, and the sources used for data collection. By scheduling this task, you will be able to do away with discretion and ensure regular cleansing of data.

Final Thoughts

To sum up, it isn’t the volume of data that decides the success of your b2b campaign but its quality. To put this into perspective, bad data can lead an automobile business’s sales reps to market lubricants to EV owners! Data hygiene helps your sales reps have the most qualified lead Score in front of their eyes translating into higher conversions. It also drives a better customer experience and improves brand perception in the competitive market.