Did you know that, just like a recipe requires fresh and well-prepared ingredients to achieve a delicious dish, data cleanliness is essential for the success of campaign strategies and communication personalization?
Imagine you're preparing a recipe for your anniversary dinner. You go to the pantry and find all the necessary ingredients, but when you go to use them, some are expired, others are mislabeled, and some are in bad condition. If you don't clean and organize your ingredients before starting to cook, it's likely the food won't turn out as expected or could even be harmful to your guests' health. A similar scenario could happen with your CRM data. If the data you use is contaminated, disorganized, or incorrect, your decisions and strategies based on them will likely result in a chain of events leading to operational deficiencies and directly affecting financial results.
Índice
What is data cleansing?
Why is data cleansing important?
How can I remove bad data from my CRM?
How can I maintain a clean database in my CRM?
Data cleansing, or data cleansing, is like meticulously checking each of the ingredients in your pantry before starting to cook. It's the process of identifying, correcting, or removing incorrect, incomplete, duplicate, or irrelevant data in a database or dataset. It's like discarding expired ingredients, correctly labeling products, and ensuring everything is in optimal condition before starting to cook.
Bad data includes irrelevant or obsolete information, incomplete contact information, or contradictory data, such as multiple phone numbers for two contact entries.
It's crucial to consider that good data goes beyond accuracy. In CRM, data quality should take priority over quantity. Keep in mind that you're investing in storing your data, so it's crucial to ensure that the information is valuable for enhancing your team, designing more efficient operations, and increasing your organization's return on investment (ROI).
As we've seen, using mislabeled or expired ingredients can ruin your recipe, and in the worst-case scenario, it could even cause harm to those consuming the food. Similarly, in your business, using incorrect, outdated, or incomplete data can lead to wrong decisions negatively affecting performance, reputation, and profitability. Data cleansing is crucial to ensure the accuracy of the information used in analysis, business strategies, marketing, and decision-making. By cleaning data, information quality is improved, errors are reduced, and confidence in the results obtained increases, allowing companies to operate more efficiently and effectively.
Now it's time to clean out the pantry. First, we need to determine which ingredients are in good condition. Check the status of your data by verifying if it's up-to-date, useful, and relevant to your team. This will allow you to know what's worth keeping and what can be removed.
In many cases, incorrect data is due to errors in data entry, but other possibilities should also be considered:
"Bounced contacts" refer to contact records in a database that have been marked as invalid or unfit to receive communications. This can happen when an email cannot be delivered due to an incorrect or nonexistent email address.
It's important to pay attention to hard bounce contacts as they can negatively impact the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and data quality. If not regularly removed or updated, these contacts can skew your metrics and make your marketing efforts less effective.
There are 6 types of Hard Bounce in HubSpot: Content, Spam, Policy, Other, Unknown user, Mailbox full, for the last two, HubSpot excludes these contacts from future emails.
Contacts with canceled subscriptions or unsubscribed are those who have opted out of receiving marketing communications or have indicated they no longer wish to receive information from the company. These contacts may have unsubscribed from newsletters, promotional emails, or other forms of commercial communication.
It's important to properly manage these contacts in the CRM to comply with privacy and data protection regulations, as well as to maintain a clean and relevant database. HubSpot offers tools to easily label and segment these contacts, allowing companies to respect customers' communication preferences and avoid sending unwanted messages.
During your cleaning process, identify and remove duplicates. Depending on your subscription level, HubSpot provides a duplicate management tool that uses machine learning to search for duplicate contacts, companies, and properties.
Once duplicates are identified, you can review them manually to determine which records are correct and which should be deleted or merged. It's important to note that duplicate management is not just about removing identical records but also identifying similar records that could refer to the same person or company. This may include variations in names, email addresses, or contact details.
There are external Duplicate Management tools that can integrate with HubSpot, available in the HubSpot App Marketplace.
It's common for some contacts to lose interest over time. Although determining if a contact is no longer engaged is not an exact science, there are some useful steps to identify them.
To alleviate some of the burden, HubSpot has a feature that skips unengaged contacts in your CRM so you only contact people who have engaged with your content.
>> Leveraging your CRM data in a Big Data strategy <<
For data entered into the CRM via forms, I advise you to establish data entry policies and keep your data clean by following these steps:
CRM data cleansing will likely be different for each team. In any case, it's important to establish a standard process for data cleansing.
You can have a CRM administrator who cleans constantly. You could also prioritize cleaning as a team effort to ensure each team member manages the data they are responsible for. This option is useful for a larger organization that deals with large amounts of data more frequently, which could be unmanageable for a single team member.
Once you've determined who will perform the cleaning, establish a routine. Instead of being constantly vigilant and evaluating data every time a new record is entered, set a monthly, quarterly, or annual schedule based on the amount of data your CRM handles.
This process will take some time to establish the right schedule for your organization, so you could start with an annual review. You can schedule your cleaning considering other important annual events, such as tax season, and consider this your "spring cleaning" for data. Whatever the schedule, cleaning will allow you to reduce clutter and send more productive messages to contacts with higher interest and conversion potential.
One way to make data cleansing easier for your team is to standardize the entry process so that future cleanings are minimal. An important way to standardize the process is to set property fields to appear automatically when contacts or companies are manually created.
You can use this same strategy when prospects enter their information on a form. By doing so, you gather information in key fields that add value to your team. To ensure your data is consistent, check your contacts in key fields where a contact wouldn't find value. For example, a contact may not have a specific industry, so designing a "unknown industry" criteria would categorize this contact more accurately. One of the biggest tips I give is that open-ended response fields should be minimized, you should always give your contact options through a dropdown (in the case of a single option) or a checkbox (if it meets more than one option).
Let's step back and imagine again that you're cooking, but not for an event at your home; now you're a professional chef, and you're cooking a complicated recipe that requires every ingredient to be perfectly measured and prepared. Similarly, these HubSpot integrations act as your kitchen assistants, ensuring that your data is clean and ready for use:
Leadspace, for example, acts as the sous chef who keeps the ingredients precise and organized so that your sales team can focus on important tasks, such as efficient lead distribution.
On the other hand, Insycle Data Management functions as your multifunctional kitchen utensil, allowing you to automate data cleaning with features such as bulk merging of duplicate records, standardization of values, and matching of records during data import. Like a well-sharpened knife, this integration helps you get your data ready for precise use.
There's no single way to keep a CRM clean, so it's important to standardize a data entry process and stick to your data cleansing routine. After all, your entire team should use the same data to ensure solutions are made and your customers experience large-scale service.
Regardless of how you clean your CRM data, stick to your plan and follow through. Maintaining a routine will allow you to have more control over your data and keep it in perfect condition.
>> Importance of the data management service today and its implications <<
As you can see, just like a recipe requires fresh and well-prepared ingredients to achieve a delicious dish, your data needs to be clean and organized to drive the success of your business strategies. At ICX, we understand the importance of data hygiene and how it can positively impact your company's performance.
Our team is here to help you optimize your CRM and ensure your Big Data is in its best shape. With our specialized solutions and services, we can help you improve the quality of your data, identify areas for improvement, and maximize the value of your technology investment.
For more information on how we can help improve your data hygiene and achieve your business goals, contact one of our Customer Success managers. They'll be happy to discuss your objectives and provide you with useful ideas and solutions to have a more organized and efficient CRM, serving as the key ingredient for your company's success.