4 Tips to Clean Up Your Customer Data

Old email addresses, duplicate contacts, misspelled names … these are the bane of your marketing and sales efforts.

After all, your CRM and marketing tools are only as powerful as the data they contain. If your databases have poor quality data, your sales and marketing initiatives will fail. Your customer data is your company’s most valuable asset. Hence, it is important to make sure that they contribute to the bottom line of your business as much as possible.

A solid data quality strategy not only saves you hours of janitorial work, it also ensures that your data is trustworthy – meaning any insights you gain from that data will be much more accurate and useful to your business.

To help you have the best possible contact information in your company databases, we’ve put together four tips for cleaning up your data.

How to clean up your company’s data

1. Remove duplicate contacts.

Duplicates are usually caused by two things: inconsistent data entry and multiple channels collecting contact information. There are tools that you can use to remove duplicate data. For example, if you work with Google Contacts, you can merge your contacts and detect duplicates for free.

If you’ve never deduplicated before, you may need to manually scan and edit your contacts. This step will take some time, but if you are implementing company-wide data collection standards and committed to quality data, you only need to do it once.

Here are some tips that can help with deduplication:

• Use a deduplicator like Dedupley.
• Use data validation tools that will help you determine the validity of your data, such as: B. Email verification tools. Experian Data Quality has some powerful validation programs that you can use to check email, addresses, and phone numbers in bulk.
• To avoid duplicate contacts in different applications, keep your core tools in sync so that you don’t have to enter the same data into different tools.

2. Check new data.

Implement a company-wide system to ensure that all new and updated data is correctly entered into the central database. For example, you can ensure that your team always fills out certain contact fields (such as name, phone number, and email) in your CRM in the same format. When creating a contact data record, you can also specify certain fields as mandatory fields so that the required information is always available.

You can also set up contact synchronization between your CRM and other tools. Just entering the data into your CRM and automatically syncing it with your other tools can help ensure that all applications have the same information, reducing the chance of data entry errors.

3. Keep your data fresh.

All databases are deteriorating – some estimate that 30% of CRM data is out of date every year. This is due to many factors including people changing email addresses, getting new phone numbers, leaving organizations, changing job titles, and more.

The best way to keep your data current is to implement a few tactics. You can do this by using analytics tools that scan all incoming email and update contact information as it becomes available.

For example, if a contact gets a job at another company, your central database is updated immediately. It’s also a good idea to delete any email addresses that have been rejected or unsubscribed – this type of information can most likely be found in your email marketing tool. Not only is this a tried and tested method of keeping your data up to date, but it will also help you keep spam folders out of the way.

4. Implement consistent data entry.

All of these actions are pointless if you don’t get everyone on your team behind you. Make sure that all employees are familiar with the company-wide data entry standards. For example, make sure everyone knows what information fields to fill in when creating a contact record, how to check for duplicates before creating a new contact, and that they are entering all of the data into the correct apps.

By following these simple tactics, you can ensure that you have a much cleaner and more organized contact database. Don’t forget to synchronize data bidirectionally between your main business applications: this minimizes manual data entry and ensures that you always see the most up-to-date and accurate contact information in all of your tools.