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All your marketing plans and strategies are successful provided that the data you use is of high-quality. You can get in touch with the most seasoned and experienced sales and marketing professionals, get the most effective CRM and automation tools, but if the data they run their campaigns on isn’t good, all their efforts will fall short.
Let’s shed light on what is considered “bad data” and how costly it can prove to be for a business. We will also discuss how you can switch from poor-quality data to high-quality data.
Defining Poor Quality Data
Irrelevant, incomplete or poor quality data is regarded as bad data. This can be in several forms. For example:
- Wrong and duplicate entries
- Non-normalized data
- Data put in wrong fields
- Information not updated. This may include old job titles, company names, or failure to make changes after acquisitions and mergers
- Missing contact fields.
It’s highly important to continually maintain data to save it from decaying. Databases should be maintained and updated on a regular basis to make sure that all sales and marketing efforts are being put in the right direction.
The Cost Of Bad Data For a Business
According to a recent survey, inaccurate and outdated data costs companies around $13 million annually. The same survey also concluded that 605 of businesses did not measure the impact they suffered from running on bad data. This basically means that a vast majority of companies fail to realize how significant is the impact of running poor-quality data for their business.
The Risks Of Poor Quality Data
To make this plain simple, using incorrect and low-quality data can hurt revenues and profits of your company. This can also dent the image of your business. Moreover, no good marketing and sales professionals will like to work with you when they see all their efforts are going to vain.
Having bad data will influence your critical business activities like prospecting or email marketing. Once your data is clean, accurate, and updated, it will enable the sales and marketing departments to align their efforts with the needs of your potential customers. Your business will get the opportunity to make the right decision based on precise data points.
How Bad Data Impacts Sales & Marketing
Having dirty and outdated data can have several consequences. Firstly, it will lead to inaccurate targeting that will hamper lead generation. Secondly, low-quality data will have a sluggish sales pipeline that will fail to convert potential leads into customers.
Furthermore, bad data also puts a halt to automation. In modern times, almost all of the sales and marketing processes are automated to get a better reach. But, since al the auto-dialing and automated email campaigns solely rely on accurate data, they will only misfire instead of leading to anything good if they’re run on bad data.
Here we have listed 3negative consequences of bad data.
Three Issues Marketing Teams Run Into Due To Bad Data
1. Increased Email Churn Rates
Email churn happens when client leakage grows. In simpler terms, churn rate refers to the percentage of email subscribers leaving your list in a certain time. Churn encompasses all the legitimate customers who used to be a part of your list, but have now unsubscribed.
For any business that uses email marketing to reach out to prospective customers, it’s highly important to factor churn when they maintain the databases. If for instance you fail to do this, you will most likely irritate and displease the people who don’t wish to be on your mailing list. As a result, they will file spam complaints. If this practice continues for long, all your client-relationship building efforts will be heavily impacted.
2. Your Target Customers Receive Wrong Content
If your database isn’t updated and accurate, you will most probably send irrelevant and wrong content to prospects. They won’t be able to relate to it, and if a cold email does not feel personalized, clients will never even go past the subject line.
Consider the example of a company CEO who downloads your whitepaper. They would certainly not like to get an email notification to download the same paper again.
These wrong steps will not only hurt your customer’s experience, but will also put a big dent on your brand reputation.
3. You Might Get Blacklisted
Email marketing is everywhere in the modern world. The convenience it offers and the sophistication of this tool make it one of the most effective weapons for any marketer.
That being said, if email marketing is run on bad data, you run the risk of falling into spam traps. Spam traps are email addresses identified as those using bad data, by Internet Service Providers.
Falling into this spam trap frequently will land you into the blacklist. Even worse, your email service provider might even suspend your email account.
How To Resolve Poor Data Quality
Your marketing team’s underperformance might just be because of bad data. To identify this problem, start by performing an audit that looks at your business’ data strategy.
1. Check and Work On Data Collection Techniques
You can:
Streamline The Web Forms:
Develop good webforms to easily capture first party data. This data will be the most important for your business as it will include all data extracted through content downloads, blog subscriptions, or from people who are sharing any bit of information on your website.
Evaluate The Quality Of Second Party and Third Party Sources
You’re most likely buying this data. And when you do, make sure you check it thoroughly before entering it into your systems.
Avoid Manual Entries
Human errors are inevitable and they occur the most in the data entry stage. To eradicate this issue, start using automation tools to increase accuracy.
2. Work With A Market Intelligence Provider
It’s anything but easy to aggregate, evaluate, and comprehend all the information your marketing and sales professionals need. For smaller businesses, this becomes a grave issue.
The best solution is to hire a market intelligence provider that also offers lead generation and appointment setting services so that you can outsource the huge amount of work needed to maintain accurate databases and get qualified leads hand in hand.
3. Work With A Reliable Data Provider
To get all your data needs satisfied, you need to get in touch with a reputable and high-quality data provider. Work with them to get rid of all the loopholes and issues in the databases of your sales and marketing contact.
When you’re on the outlook for a good data provider, make sure you check their accuracy, coverage, and consistency they provide for data.
Wrap Up
When you build your business function on high-quality and accurate data, you ensure that all your sales and marketing efforts are successfully connecting you with the right audience. Otherwise, you will keep missing out on revenues, and potential customers.
Remember, the cost of having bad data significantly overshadows the cost of getting good data for your business.
Think you need an expert demand generation consultant to manage your database, provide accurate market research, and build right prospects for your business? Get in touch with Zaphyre today.
