What data cleansing can do for you: the basics

Businesses often collect a lot of personal information from prospects and customers.

Over time, this information becomes outdated.

Data cleansing is a key part of any overall data management process.

The data cleansing process involves going through a dataset and removing dirty data, updating information that is incorrect, inaccurate or badly formatted.

A data cleansing tool can also remove duplicate data.

The purpose of data cleaning is not necessarily to delete information, but instead to amend, update, and reorganise data to maximise efficiency throughout your system.

Almost 70% of marketers acknowledge that their organisations have inadequate or inaccurate records of prospects, according to a Forrester analyst.

Any effort marketers put into refining their strategies, prospecting or nurturing leads is unlikely to succeed without clean data to support them.

 

6 marketing impacts of good quality data

 

1. Identify your target audience and find ways of reaching them

Raw data is often collected from multiple sources, but your marketing database likely treats every entry as a new item (or lead).

This can lead to bad data, and a disorganised dataset which is hard to make use of during prospecting and direct marketing.

This means that data scrubbing is necessary after data collection, prior to integrating data into a marketing campaign, such as lead generation or email marketing.

The more clean, high-quality data you have, the easier it is to score leads.

This helps your sales and marketing teams to identify the most valuable prospects to connect with.

They can then use data analysis to decide how best to reach them and which digital channels are most likely to lead to conversions.

2. Multichannel data management

Cleansing data is the key to managing multichannel customer data effectively.

With accurate customer data across all channels, including phone, postal and email, your marketing campaigns are more effective

3. Improve team productivity

In addition to improving data quality, data cleansing also increases productivity.

Correcting incorrect data means organisations don’t have to waste time searching through irrelevant and inaccurate information in order to perform basic tasks.

4. Better decision-making

Data quality deteriorates quickly.

Data decay in B2B companies typically occurs at a rate of 35% annually.

Keeping data clean ensures quality and enables more accurate analytics, which aid in decision-making.

Data is essential for gaining a deeper understanding of your audience and implementing strategies to bolster long-term business performance.

5.  Maintain a positive reputation

The average person does not want to be spammed with irrelevant information.

Spam and unsolicited messages can damage a brand’s reputation.

Having accurate data ensures that your communications reach the right people. Your company will gain visibility in your sector, while also maintaining credibility and integrity.

6. Ensure compliance

Data security and permissions are more important than ever following the introduction of the GDPR in 2018.

A regular cleaning of databases helps businesses keep track of customer permissions and ensures that people who did not wish to be contacted are not contacted.

By keeping your data set clean and organised, you’ll be able to avoid GDPR fines and other penalties.

 

Data cleansing with More Than Words Marketing

 

At More Than Words Marketing, we pride ourselves on offering our clients the best marketing databases available.

With missing data, incorrect data or duplicate values, our clients would not see the results they do.

Besides our own master database, we have direct access to the databases of some of Britain’s leading media partners, against which we check and cleanse our clients’ data.

Our expert researchers can make sure your records are up-to-date by using our data cleaning tool to check every record you own.

We will:

• check for data errors,
• replace duplicate, inaccurate, and missing fields, and
• ensure contact and organisational information is current.

 

The data cleaning process – More Than Words’ 5 step approach

 

1. Removing irrelevant notes or records

We’ll remove any notes and irrelevant observations created by your staff.

We’ll also remove any organisations or decision makers whose data doesn’t need cleaning.

2. Removal of structural errors

It is best to standardise all fields across a database when cleaning data.

Titles (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr, etc.) and address details are two areas where structural errors frequently occur.

3. Data appending

If you want to use your database for direct marketing and customer follow-up, you need to include details such as name, job title, purchasing responsibilities, and the company or organisation contacts work for.

If any of these fields do not contain data, we will consult our master database.

4. Correcting errors in data

In cases where the information in a field in a record on your database is outdated or inaccurate, it will be replaced.

5. Data presentation

A summary of the results of the data cleansing is provided at the end of each project, including statistics, showing the number of missing fields we found and how many inaccurate records we found and removed.

 

Your customer and prospect database are assets of great value for lead generation, customer relationship management and customer outreach.

Data cleansing is a crucial process for maintaining these assets and ensuring great results from them every time.

Call More Than Words Marketing on 0330 010 8300 to find out more about their data cleansing services.