Dirty data costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity. This is true whether the data is purchased, gathered via download offers or stored in a company’s internal database.

This problem is driven by several factors. Today’s mobile workforce is changing jobs faster than ever before. According to Gartner, 30 million of the 138 million workers in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. Now add that to the number of businesses that move or get acquired every month. It’s easy to see how they dirty data piles up and piles up fast.

To make matters even worse, feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect. This can quickly derail success by:

• Delivering multiple wrong messages to the wrong person or persons.
• Annoying customers and prospects with redundant messages.
• Losing credibility due to botched attempts at personalized communications.
• Failing to leverage multi-modal marketing capabilities.
• Misinterpreting campaign success metrics.
• Creating sales inefficiencies.

So how can a company address this problem? It’s not easy. Most marketers are overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in different states of completion. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.

The best way to start cleaning data is by targeting the right companies, along with the decision makers who actually determine the buying process.  Develop a profile of what your ideal customer would look like, working from there you should be able to weed out less-than ideal candidates or at least give some kind of prioritization to companies in your database.

To get more from your in-house data for lead generation, you need to keep it clean ― but that’s like hitting a moving target. With companies merging or going out of business and a workforce that is constantly changing, marketing databases get dirtier at an alarming rate.

In fact, 2.1% of data goes bad every month, according to MarketingSherpa. This means  over 25% of contact data goes bad per year.

The only problem is knowing which 25%.

The good news is that marketers can dramatically improve their campaign results by using the right strategies to consistently update, clean and refresh their lead-generation database. According to SiriusDecisions, “the company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.”

Lately, we’ve been talking about the best ways to start with data cleanup, what to consider when marketing to your in-house database, important signs that your database might need help, and more.

Armed with this information, you should be in a better position to optimize your in-house database, reduce wasted efforts, improve conversions and get more revenue from your marketing dollar.

Do you have some great tips for starting the clean up process?

Aberdeen recently released a great report on leveraging customer data to better serve your marketing efforts. Here are some of the take-away points we thought were worth sharing:

If your database is in the slow lane:

• Start by using data for activities that will have a positive impact on revenue. Demonstrate the value of your data to justify investment in its ongoing health.
• Develop timelines and processes for cleaning your data. The importance of good data hygiene can’t be understated. If you clean it once and walk away it will get dirty again. Only constant attention will yield golden results.
• Invest in tools to help analyze customer data. Data analysis and marketing automation technologies will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

If your database is already on the right path but needs a boost to hit the fast lane:

• Implement a formal data hygiene strategy. Create repeatable processes for de-duping, cleaning, and appending data as well as documenting best practices for users of your data.
• Engage multiple departments for data analysis. Encourage collaboration between your sales, marketing, customer service, IT, and finance organizations.

• Democratize all customer data. Centralize your database to measure and optimize the performance of your multichannel campaigns.

Circuit City, Bank One, Enron, Lehman Brothers…these are folks you might be shocked to find still sitting in your sales and marketing databases.  What’s the common theme among all of these companies? They aren’t doing business anymore. Some of them have made very splashy exits from the scene (ehhem Enron??) and some have quietly been forgotten as acquisitions from a few years back (Bank One). Search around and you may just find them in your target lists.

As a rule, no salesperson or marketing team wants to waste time trying to talk to companies that are out of business.  It only makes good sense to weed those companies (and affected contacts) out. But how do you know who they are? Aggregating data from all the M& A activity, bankruptcies and shut-downs these days can be time-consuming. In face, it can become a full-time job.  Why not seek out some proactive solutions to keep these types of situations out of your database? Besides some shameless self-promotion here (yes, ReachForce has a solution for this), one of our best suggestions is to empower your teams to mark this kind of information in your database. That way you can weed them out as they come up. For a salesforce.com-specific tip on how to set up this weed-out process, check out a few of our past posts, Updating Lead Status in SFDC for Better Marketing Data and Cleaning Up Your  Marketing Database

Like it or not, data fuels the engine of your business. Your sales teams need it to prospect, cross-sell and upsell. And your marketing teams need it to create viable campaigns so your sales team has a message to sell. With that in mind, what exactly are you doing with that ever growing pile of information?  Do you have someone to keep it fresh, or does it sit untouched, unmaintained and just plain unloved?

No matter what, you need a plan for organizing the monolith that is your database. SiriusDecisions estimates that in a typical B2B company error rates are as high as 25%. That means that if you have a team of sales reps working with that data, 25% of their efforts are wasted.  At the same time, it means that 25% of your marketing departments’ messages cannot get through and likely are falling on deaf ears.  That’s pretty wasteful.  In an economic climate like ours you have to be lean and mean. Wasting 25% of your sales efforts and marketing messages just isn’t in-line.

Ok, so the baby (your database) is ugly, but how do you fix it? Set up error reporting so that you empower your users to point out the problems (see Cleaning Up Your  Marketing Database). Then assign some ownership, giving someone the responsibility to oversee, fix and police your database to ensure positive change.  You have to have a continual focus on data quality, because constant improvement will lead to gains across the board.  If you need proof, SiriusDecisions estimates that B2B companies that address the root cause of data errors can realize a 25% increase in converting inquiries to marketing-qualified leads.

You have an HR handbook, departmental training materials, and documented procedures. But do you have standards and rules for your marketing and sales database?  You should.  Without some law and order, your database will start looking like the wild West of marketing and sales data.  Here are some of our suggestions for putting these rules to paper:
1.    Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
a.    Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (e.g. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
b.    Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM/Marketing Automation system to work. For instance, if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses, outline what those rules are and how data has to be fomatted to fit within those rules.
c.    Requested information to make marketing, sales, customer support, or anyone else working in your database work better.

2.    Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields identified above.  (E.G. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, etc.)

3.    Do a gap analysis. Understand who is in the target Decision Making Unit and make sure all relevant contacts are present that for your target accounts and prospects.

4.    Make sure this data has an undisputed owner. Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time? Depending on how you answer these questions, you may want to chat with the team or person that ‘owns’ the data. That way you can make sure that the way you choose to fill in the gaps suits their needs as well.

Are your email lists growing?  If so, you’re among the majority of marketers, according to Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark survey.   Despite the doom and gloom in the economy lately the majority of respondents appear to have not lost considerable portions of their email lists over the last year.

Here’s the better question, do you know which portion of your list is good? Do you keep accurate record of what has bounced, who has unsubscribed or what companies have shut down? You should, those numbers impact your email campaigns in so many ways that it is key to keep tabs on the changes.  One easy way to do that is with a ‘Lead/Contact Status’ field on your records.  If you’re working in Salesforce.com they make it very easy as this field already exists as a standard field on Lead Records, now you just need to go in and customize the picklist!

Some of the types of things we have as possible Lead Status’ at ReachForce are:

Open
Bounce Back
Additional Followup needed
Mtg – continue marketing
Mtg – additional follow up needed
Mtg – no interest, no fit
Wrong Contact: NLT
Company No Fit: Closed/Acquired
Company No Fit: No interest/need
Company No Fit: See desc. Notes
Wrong Contact: See Comp. No Fit Notes
Unsubscribed

As you can see, our status field covers a range of things that are important to our sales team and some that are important to only our marketing team.  We use these fields to determine who to continue to pull into marketing campaigns and who to put into a file to Refresh (aka send through our process that phone verifies whether the person is still there, whether they fill the role we need and whether we have the right contact info for them).

We have also employed this type of dispositioning on our Contact records by creating a custom field.  For us, if something has made it to the Contact stage it has been qualified, we know that they are a fit for us, etc. so there’s no need to have some of the same status types and we narrowed down the list of statuses to the following:

Good
Email Bounce
Company Closed/Acquired/Bankrupt
No Longer There
Unsubscribed

Keeping these statuses updated is a two-fold responsibility….our sales team updates them as they call or have meetings/appointments with different people and our marketing team updates them as we have bounce backs or unsubscribes that we can track from Eloqua.   Overall, we have found this status field on our records to be an indispensible piece to keeping our email lists up to date.

I have heard mixed reviews on using personalization in email marketing.  And if you have dirty data with things like LEIGH ANNE or Leigh Anne (don’t call til Q1) in the first name field of your CRM, using personalization can be pretty scary and it might be time for some data cleansing.  MarketingSherpa is a proponent of personalization as they use it in their own emails.  But shame on them for an email my co-worker, Lauren, received.  Check this out:

Dear ,

There aren’t too many positives to come out of the recession.

However, new MarketingSherpa research reveals one overwhelming positive: more than ever, companies are relying upon email marketing to engage prospects and generate high ROI…

Leading with the recession (which I believe is grossly overused) aside, “Dear” is not a greeting that can stand alone.  If you are going to use personalization with a holey database, you have to be careful.  Use a greeting like “Hi”.  It can be followed with a name or just a comma and not look weird or let prospects know that you don’t really know who they are. After all, the point of personalization is to make a prospect feel as though it is one-to-one communication.

If you read our post about metrics Marketing should care about and you use Salesforce here are some easy to follow instructions for putting lead source tracking into place.

Lead Source (the field with the big red arrow next to it), is a standard field in Salesforce, so it’s easy enough to locate and use, the important thing is to put your own custom sources into the pick-list and to use them.

1. To add custom values to the pick-list, you’ll need administrative privileges.
2. Click on ‘Setup,’ then under ‘App Setup’ you’ll want to click on Leads.
3. Next select ‘Fields’ and you’ll get a listing of all of the fields in your CRM.  Click next to ‘Lead Source’ on the ‘Edit’ link.
   
4. Once you are in the edit interface, you’ll be able to add items to the pick-list by selecting ‘New.’
   
5. From there you’ll be given an easy, step-by-step way to insert a new value into the list.

As you can see, we have a variety of different lead sources, you’ll want to make sure your list matches the places that you gather leads from.   Now when you import leads you can select to attribute them to one of these values, thus helping you better track where things come from.

Now you’ll be able to run  reports on these fields, luckily, lead source is a standard field on the Contact record in Salesforce as well and it’s mapped so that the lead source transfers over to the Contact record when you convert Leads.

The marketing database plays a vital role in maximizing marketing effectiveness.  A lack of a centralized and complete marketing database impacts the marketer’s ability to both create and execute highly effective marketing strategy.

The marketing database feeds the marketing mix, it helps determine which targets and segments a company should pursue, and it ultimately allows the organization to consistently develop better products and services and market these products and services efficiently and effectively.

Most importantly, the marketing database is the lifeblood of marketing campaign execution.  The ability to deliver relevant, timely marketing messages to prospects and customers across one or more marketing channels is directly correlated to the quality of your marketing database.  As a result, marketers need to trust in their marketing database; therefore ensure that the data is accurate, complete and reliable.

Market leading organizations heavily rely on their marketing database to build intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve the quality of your marketing database and ultimately the ability to execute more effective marketing campaigns.

Read each question below and write down the appropriate number of points according to your answers.  Once you’re done, add up your score to determine if you are a database slacker, an average Joe database marketer, or a database jockey with the right customer and prospect data at your fingertips all day, every day.

Rate the quality of your marketing database?

• Complete- Award yourself 4 points if you are confident in the quality of the marketing database you rely on execute marketing campaigns
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident in the quality of your marketing database but there’s still some room for improvement.
• It’s in bad shape- Award yourself 0 points if you are confident in the fact that your database marketing practices are less than desirable and leave room for significant improvement.

Do you currently have a centralized marketing database that provides one source of the truth for marketing, sales, and service?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have a centralized database that delivers a 360 view of customers across marketing, sales and service
• No- 0 points if you are still operating multiple siloed databases or worse excel spreadsheets

Do you augment your marketing database with information to enhance, authenticate, or supplement your marketing database?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you enhance the quality of existing data through third party data sources or marketing database integration tools.
• No- 0 points if existing marketing database is rarely enhanced

Do you regularly scrub the database for erroneous or outdated information?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if you constantly monitor the quality of the data (regardless of whether it’s manual or automated)
• No- 0 points if you can’t remember the last time you acted on the quality of your marketing database.

Do you collect multi-channel information to build customer profiles?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you supplement individual leads data with information from two or more marketing channels: email campaigns received, click-through history, website visits, landing page form captures, survey questions, direct mail, etc.
• Sort of- Award yourself 1 point if you supplement individual leads data with information from one marketing channel
• No- 0 points if you have yet to integrate multi-channel activity at the customer account level.

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____+ e._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-5 Points: Database Slacker -  A final score between 0-5 indicates you need to spend more time focusing on your marketing database.  Your competitors and peers are utilizing marketing database techniques that will give them a competitive advantage.  Your marketing database can become outdated and erroneous rapidly; particularly with the rapid growth in digital marketing channels.  The most effective marketing creative is useless if the customer or prospect never sees it, and poor data quality in personalized campaigns can erode brand reputation.  Consider devoting organizational resources to (1) manually scrubbing the marketing database for duplicate data, erroneous data, or missing data and (2) refreshing the marketing database through a third-party marketing data provider.
• 6-12 Points: Average Joe – A final score between 6-12 indicates your marketing database is in reasonable shape, but you should consider initiatives to improve data quality.  This could include augmenting or validating the current marketing database with a third-party data purchase or assigning resources to manually scrub the database by hand.  Consider cross-checking bounced email addresses from outbound email campaigns and removing these email addresses from the database.  Likewise, make sure you are constantly offering customers an opportunity to opt-out of communications.
• 12-14 Points: Database Jockey- A final score between 12-14 points indicates your marketing database is in great shape.  The question is, what are you actually doing with this robust marketing database to improve marketing effectiveness?