Top 5 Data Hygiene Issues

CRM Systems are becoming increasingly more important in today’s information and digital age. Companies rely on them to help provide the Who, What, When and Where of sales, marketing and communication. But without good and clean data, it would be challenging to for Marketers to find their answers and effectively drive engagement.

In my experience, roughly 15-20% of CRM Database records go bad each year. And here are the Top 5 reasons:

1) Movers – people have physically changed address and have not provided forwarding information.
2) Deceased – some will have lost their lives over the year.
3) New Accounts – some will have created new accounts with updated information.
4) Data Entry Errors – sales people, data entry clerks and even the customer can enter bad info.
5) Missing Data – some records will be partially entered at POS (Point-Of-Sale) for many reasons.

CRM users use the term “course data” to describe information that is broken and inaccurate. And we use the term “data scrubbing” as the process for evaluating data for inaccuracies and subsequently cleaning it. Companies that fail to identify course data and scrub it will find their marketing costs rising and campaign effectiveness dwindling.

A large mail house, CRM Vendor or your Technical team can help with data hygiene. And, it may actually require some input from all 3 in order to get the job done properly. As well, I wouldn’t be surprised if some Big Data companies also provide data scrubbing services (see data cleansing cycle below).

No matter who does the job, it’s important to be sure the cleansed data flows into connected systems such as Email, Ecommerce, SMS and the like…..where ever there are marketing touch-points. Failure to make this connection will cause the issues to be further perpetuated. I should also note that any address information should be standardized in the “cleansing” process so that it’s consistent with the USPS and ensure delivery.

Having bad data in your CRM and related systems can cause the following issues:

a) Undelivered Mail – each bad address in your mail file will cost you postage, printing and paper.
b) Reduced Engagement – missing name, suffix and or salutation information will reduce your ability to personalize marketing messages and thus grab the customer’s attention.
c) Erroneous Segmentation & Targeting – partial records can impact customer segmentation, especially if it causes multiple records to be created for a single customer. Sales can be scattered across multiple accounts.

All of the above issues will substantially impact customer engagement, conversion and campaign ROI. This can be a perpetual campaign if scrubbing systems aren’t setup and maintained on a regular basis.