Marketers put in so much effort to earn customer data. But those data that are neatly stored in the database are usually at an alarming rate. Especially in the B2B market with high job turnover, contact data decays as high as 70% per year.
It’s not just the people changing contact information or their job. Businesses also transform. They may buy other companies or merge. New offices are built. Old ones may close down. Email conventions undergo change. Streets or cities get renamed. Zip codes change. Postal address conventions may also change. The reasons are numerous.
Considering these data changes that may happen many times a month, the businesses need to focus on cleansing it regularly.
Clean Database Protects Your Brand Reputation
No matter how skilled you are, an outdated database will put you in trouble. It wastes your valuable marketing dollars as you send messages to out-of-date, duplicate, or simply uninterested contacts.
Note that, if you keep promoting your brand to the inactive email addresses, you’ll most likely be blacklisted. That isn’t the only case. Sometimes subscribers may tag your message as spam if your content doesn’t interest them. And, the more your address gets marked as spam, the higher the chances are that email providers consider this signal seriously and automatically direct all your messages to the spam folder.
If you don’t want any of such things to happen, I recommend you to start scrubbing your marketing data. By keeping your database clean, you can preserve your existing budgets and also uphold your reputation in the market.
Clean Database Gives You a Clear Picture
If you want to have a clear insight into the marketing funnel, you need to clean your database regularly. Otherwise, you may miss out on useful information for your campaign execution. Consider the below questions.
- How many quality leads you have acquired?
- How many contacts are stale and need to be cleansed?
- What leads should you eliminate for better results?
A clean database provides an answer to all these questions. Besides, it also helps you in segmenting the records wisely so that you can provide a personalized experience to your customers. For instance, a retail industry can make the customer feel special by offering a highly customized recommendation and also optimize the price for loyal customers. Isn’t that interesting?
So, get rid of invalid email addresses, remove duplicate records, eliminate junk contacts, and then segment your list properly to tailor your outreach.
Clean Database helps you Define Your Priority
Does your marketing database contain many inactive contacts? Most of those inactive records belong to the customers who have purchased once and never returned. It’s a bit trickier to determine whether to eliminate such records or keep it further. Once you make this decision, it will be easier to create a marketing strategy that results in the high deliverability and produces better outcome.
I would say acquiring fresh prospects is pretty expensive, so you shouldn’t give up on inactive contacts so quickly. At least send them a we-missed-you email or provide some incentives to see if they come back to you. If they fail to respond to this email, remove them from your list. The size of your customer database may get shorter, but the quality will be improved.
How to Keep Your Database Clean?
So far, we have seen the reasons for data decay and the importance of a clean database. Now let’s see how to keep it clean.
Firstly, keep your brand away from blacklisting. So, you need to get rid of hard bounces as soon as possible. Once you are done, track all the auto-responses and replies as it notifies you about the changed addresses that have to be updated in the database.
Next, remove all the records of inactive prospects. Although they haven’t unsubscribed or marked your email as spam, there’s no point in keeping such inactive records anymore.
If you find it too challenging to clean your database by yourself, there are specific data cleansing tools and services that help you in this area. Basically, they scrub all your records and keep it clean and relevant.
Now it’s your turn
Although data decay is a chronic and pervasive issue, the fix is incredibly simple and reliable. The companies with the biggest and the most valuable customer databases have been cleaning their database for years. If you haven’t cleaned your marketing records since its creation, it’s high time to do so. Otherwise, you may ruin your CRM, and it will certainly cost you a lot.
