THE BASICS OF CRM MAINTENANCE: HOW CLEAN IS YOUR DATA?

If you don’t actively cleanse and update your data it is estimated that 70% of your database could be inaccurate after just one year.

CRM Maintenance is a necessity.

With record numbers of business formations the UK, in 5 years’ time around half of the hundreds of thousands of new companies will no longer exist. Together with the increasing trends of job-hopping and freelancing, your contacts are unlikely to stay in one place for long.

The current environment presents a serious challenge for any organisation’s contact lists and CRM. For a typical B2B company, it is estimated that between 2 and 5 percent of company data decays each month.

BDP works with companies to help them to create and win new sales opportunities, this includes helping clients to cleanse their contact databases, effective data entry and data discovery. Our experience across numerous verticals and working with SME’s to large multinational organisations means that we understand best practice when it comes to CRM and data – here are some dos and the don’ts of storing data.

A few key terms:

‘Data erosion’ refers to the process of stored data becoming out of date or irrelevant for sales and marketing purposes.
‘Dirty data’is data that is either now irrelevant for whatever reason – companies move or go bankrupt, email conventions change, phones are lost, people move etc. – or has been entered incorrectly or incompletely.
‘Data scrubbing’or ‘CRM cleansing’ counteracts these inaccuracies by removing dead leads, correcting typos, and updating lead information.
‘Data discovery’is the process of finding replacements for previous contacts and replenishing your CRM database once the dead wood has been removed.

How Clean is Your Data?

Around 60% of UK companies rate the overall health of their data as ‘unreliable’ and with research showing that the average B2B database is 25 percent inaccurate at any given time – so how would you rate your data?

Research from Experian has shown that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of companies. Paying your staff to pursue dead leads, and pouring money into resources and marketing spend when your data is inaccurate, is an expensive mistake. One that costs the average company loses on average 12% of its revenue.

Bad data doesn’t just cost you money – it also can cost your brand credibility. Out-of-date or misplaced messaging worsens your customer’s experience – 28% of companies Experian surveyed who have experienced problems delivering emails also reported that customer service suffered as a result. A further 21% experienced reputational damage as bad data leads to inaccurate targeting and prospects do not like to be hit with irrelevant messaging.

So… How Dirty Is Your Data?

We have compiled a list of tell-tale signs that your data has eroded. Do any of these points sound familiar?

Your bounce rate is higher than 10%.An email bouncing indicates that the account is no longer in use or the address has been entered incorrectly – a definite sign of you need to work on your CRM.
You duplicate rate is over 1% on any campaign.Duplicates are a sign of sloppy data entry and an out of date CRM. Your duplicate rate should be 0.
Your unsubscribe rate is over 2%.People unsubscribe when messaging is generic or irrelevant – so if your messaging is going out to the wrong contacts, like sending prospecting emails out to current clients for instance. Other indicators are a lower open rate and a lower reply rate, but bear in mind that any of these could also be an indicator of poor content and strategy.

What Can You Do To Cleanse Your CRM?

Deal with it internally.

You could set up teams internally to handle regularly checking through your CRM data. The size of the team, and the cost of this investment will vary depending on how large your CRM database is. For most companies, handling regular cleansing and health checks internally is time-consuming and expensive.

Tools and Automation.

There is a wide variety of tools that you can use to help maintain your CRM’s health These tools can help flag multiple data quality issues, however for the purpose of data erosion the benefit of these tools is limited as they can only flag bounces, not replace them with viable contacts. This means they cannot effectively deal with the issue of employees having left the company and suggesting replacements.

Outsource the work.

BDP offers CRM cleansing and data discovery services to B2B companies of all sizes, all over the world. We guarantee complete confidentiality and security – any data we process will not be stored on a centralised database and will not be sold on. We remove leads you no longer need and replace them with active contacts with accurate contact details.

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