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At Interrupt Media, one of the very first things we do when we onboard a new client to assist with increasing their marketing-generated pipeline, is a CRM database health check.

Whether you are using Salesforce or a Marketing Automation tool like Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot, or Sharpspring, data quality will make or break the success of your marketers and sales teams.

So we begin by going in and surveying the health of your contacts.

During this health check, we pinpoint any gaps or inconsistencies in the quality of the data so that we’re sure any marketing efforts we conduct will be effective and reach the right audience.

This is similar to when an architect is drawing up plans for a new building. Before his team does anything, he’ll have the land surveyed.

Why?

Because it would be a waste of time and resources to build something on a weak foundation.

So in the marketing world, before we launch any marketing campaigns, we’re going to make sure our contact database (our foundation) is healthy so we don’t waste our time marketing to someone who will never get the message.

What is CRM Data?

To make sure we’re all on the same page, a CRM database is all of the contact data that you would keep about your customers and prospects. It is typically stored and accessed electronically from a computing system.

This can be physical hardware or cloud-based storage. This can include both non-sensitive and sensitive client information, assets, files, basically anything you store digitally to track and communicate with a lead.

Nonsensitive lead information could be firmographic information about the business (ex: industry, company size, location, tools they use, etc) or demographic information about the people working at those companies (ex: title, email, phone, department).

Sensitive information might be data about their revenue or details of the deal that you are attempting to make with them.

What is a CRM Data Hygiene Check?

When a client hires us, we perform a database health check by making a series of observations about various aspects of their CRM systems, contact records, or marketing automation tools.

We note what we see, provide metrics, and suggest improvements or cleanup based on our observations. This may be removing bad data, eliminating duplication, adding additional clean data to enrich contacts, or correcting inaccuracies in the data.

As I stated before, data cleaning is something we do for all of our customers, before beginning our work, to make sure they get the most benefit from our services.

Now that we’ve established what your database is and what a database health check does, let’s get into why it’s important to perform a database health check, how to perform one and what you can do with the results.

Why  CRM Database Health Checks Important?

Oftentimes, when we perform these database health checks, we find quite a bit of messy data entry. We might see:

• Duplicate records or duplicate data
• Data points that are misspelled or not capitalized
• Addresses or job titles that are inaccurate or incomplete
• Important fields that are inaccurate or missing data sources altogether, etc.

Unfortunately, outdated or incorrect data is just a part of the reality of data collection.

Human error is a factor and also, data changes over time and we wouldn’t know instinctively to update our records. The problem is that inaccurate data and dirty data lead to miscommunication, time wasted, and revenue loss.

However, when your contact information is cleaned up and enriched properly, it saves time and marketing campaigns are likely to be far more effective. Ultimately, data cleansing results in:

• Improved segmentation and lead generation
• Better ROI and protection of revenue projections
• Reduced errors that negatively impact reputation and waste time
• Better relationships with customers

How is a Database Health Check Performed?

A CRM database health check and proper data management can seem like time-consuming tasks, more so as your list grows, but the bottom line is that it’s critical for a good marketing strategy.

To reduce the amount of time required to clean up your customer data and make it a more digestible process, you can break it down into several pieces. Our workflow looks a little like this.

Step 1: Standardizing Format

This is probably the most common issue we find when we perform database health checks. When you have data coming in from different sources, there are naturally going to be some formatting differences.

Some frequent ones you might find are names, phone numbers, abbreviations, and addresses.

You may also find extra spaces or characters that hurt the integrity of the data and increase bounce rates. Sometimes there are just cases of pure human error, other times they are caused by encoding issues.

Either way, it’s important to correct these issues to keep good data.

While these aren’t going to necessarily kill a deal, it does reflect poorly on your marketing team to let something go out with a name not capitalized.

Other types of poor data, however, can be a real problem.

For instance, emails that have spaces or aren’t in the proper name@domain.com format. Obviously, if these issues aren’t fixed, you’ll receive bounced emails. This hurts your domain and results in wasted time.

One of the best things you can do is to create a standard ahead of time that indicates how each field will be formatted. This will increase the likelihood of accurate data over time.

Step 2: Purging Duplicates and Bad Contacts

Now that we’re done cleaning the data, the next step is to purge your data of unnecessary records and fields that will reduce data bloat and may even data storage costs. Wondering what to remove? Here’s where we start:

Remove bounced contacts

Not only are these records a bit pointless to keep around, but high bounce rates can hurt your standing with email providers. This includes both email and phone numbers.

Remove unsubscribed contacts

This one is a bit of a no-brainer since you already know it’s illegal to continue to solicit someone that has unsubscribed from your list. Think of it this way: they’re not interested in your services/products and yet you’re paying to keep them in your contacts. Bye Bye.

Merge duplicate leads & fields

Removing duplicate contacts is another huge one! This can cause several problems, particularly if the duplicate has inaccurate or different data than its counterpart.

You don’t want to risk that users might be entering notes on a duplicate contact and this contact is accidentally worked multiple times.

Yikes!

The same goes for duplicate fields. There’s just no reason for this. The redundant data will just weigh down your storage size and make the contact look cluttered.

What to do With the Results of a Database Health Report

Now that you’ve cleaned up your data, you can start implementing your marketing campaigns with the confidence that you’ll be reaching the right people and qualifying leads for sales opportunities.

Also, you’re now aware of your data gaps and can work on filling those, whether it’s data from existing prospects or new leads.

Moving forward, it’s incredibly important to perform routine health checks every 6-12 months as data tends to degrade over time. There are tools, like Discoverorg, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clearbit, and Builtwith, that can aid you in keeping your data integrity once you’ve performed your initial cleanse.

Database cleansing can be a tedious process depending on how big your database is.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to handle this project, or if you’d just like a professional team to come alongside you and help you analyze your CRM database and provide solutions to help you optimize your database health, please reach out to us today!

Topics: CRM, Data Analytics