The Importance of a Clean Marketing Database

Every business uses some form of marketing to promote their products and services. Whether using social media or direct mail, each customer that is marketed to is a unique piece of data with their own characteristics.

Marketing success depends on the ability to target customers based on their behaviors, preferences, and history. Marketing is a fast-paced business, and keeping up with changes in those customer characteristics is even faster. Being able to maintain an accurate and clean marketing database is incredibly important for success.

Marketers need to know not only who their customers are, but exactly what they are looking for. Analyzing everything from personality to behavior can go a long way in creating a personalized experience and targeting marketing efforts towards the right customers. Marketing is fast-paced, and having accurate data is what separates winning and losing campaigns.

It also means that marketing has a responsibility to create leads for sales reps using those campaigns. More than 75% of companies provide more than 25% of their sales reps’ leads, according to Sales Insights Lab, many provided by marketing. However, many companies struggle with outdated or incomplete data leading to incomplete customer records.

Keeping a clean marketing database makes all the difference in your marketing campaigns.

What Makes a Marketing Database Clean?

Clean data is what helps every marketer create and convey stronger messages and make smarter decisions. However, the truth is that many marketers struggle with outdated or incorrect data. Annually, 70% of CRM data becomes obsolete, according to NetGuru. Imagine if you sent out a direct mail campaign to 20,000 customers, and half of the addresses were incorrect. That's a lot of wasted time and money, and it won't bring in any results.

To say that data is “quality” is very subjective to each industry. Marketing based on someone looking for a home is vastly different from marketing someone who might need auto warranty coverage. One is relative to a large purchase, and the other is dependent on mileage, age, and other factors.

Most marketers agree that for a database to be a strong starting point, the data needs to be accurate, up-to-date, complete, and consistent. This means that every record should have as many of the same fields completed in the same way as possible, as well as removing any duplicate records.

What are the Consequences of Poor Data?

You may as well be throwing your money away if you’re using inaccurate data in marketing campaigns. IBM estimates that bad data costs U.S. businesses $3.1 trillion each year. That number doesn’t consider the amount of customers who unsubscribe from marketing due to poor data management and not knowing customer preferences.

Customers are variable and ever changing in their characteristics and preferences. They get married, divorced, have children, move, pass away, change lifestyles, and more. No marketer is ever going to be able to have every single customer record as 100% accurate, because they don’t know these people personally to be able to record those changes.

How Do I Keep a Clean Marketing Database?

The first step to cleaning up your database is to remove old records, whether due to inactivity or using a propensity scoring model to see if they may still have interest. Records that are incomplete or missing key data attributes should then be reviewed to see if they can be updated – if not, unsubscribe them!

It’s also important to review if there are any duplicate records, and if so, which record is the most accurate. This will stop customers from receiving multiple marketing attempts that may not currently relate to them.

Finally, make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. If they don’t want to be marketed, let them go! Many customers may just need a break from marketing and resubscribe later.

Maintaining a clean marketing database is the first step in effective marketing. It helps businesses to target the right customers, boost ROI, and reduce wasteful spending.  

Milestone Marketing Solutions is here to assist you with your marketing needs. We would love to speak with you to learn more about how we may be able to assist in analyzing your marketing database to create campaigns that produce superior results. Contact us and we will respond as soon as possible.