BEST PRACTICES FOR MAINTAINING DATA HYGIENE

Debottam Dutta February 3, 2020

Copy: The rate at which your customer database decays is 30% annually and this is
a conservative estimate. Maintaining data hygiene is critical for your business’s
success. Find out how you can keep your data clean by following the steps
mentioned in this article.
Data is at the core of every business decision these days. The HR departments are
gathering it from various online sources to recruit the best people and conduct
quick background checks on them. Marketing departments use data exhaustively
to generate a deeper understanding of their customers, track leads and speed-up
the sales process wherever they can. Business executives employ data to examine
market trends such as changes in resource pricing, manufacturing, logistics, etc.
Data analytics is bringing about a slow revolution and has become an
irreplaceable component in devising effective business strategies.

However, it is not enough to simply acquire mountains of data. Businesses need to

learn how to effectively use data to make decisions. There is an insurmountable
amount of data available with companies today. But only a chunk of it is useful. A
block of relevant data can be mined by analytics and data scientists. Once data is
mined, it needs to be cleansed to make it more powerful and valuable for users.
Maintaining data hygiene by cleaning it through the practices mentioned below
must be a top priority for companies.

What Is Data Hygiene?

Companies need to work with structured data for achieving higher precision in
marketing strategies. Data that is accurate, uniform, consistent, complete, and
unique is considered hygienic or cleansed and can be further enriched to provide
valuable insights to businesses. Data cleansing is not simply about deleting
information to make space for fresh data, but about maximizing data set’s
accuracy without necessarily erasing information. The most significant goal
of maintaining data hygiene is to develop data sets that are uniform and
standardized to allow various analytical tools to seamlessly run on them, thereby
helping to derive precious business insights.

Benefits of Data Hygiene/Cleansing

A study conducted by Tetra Data concluded that 40% of marketers think that
companies do not use data effectively. A lot of this has to do with not intercepting
the true benefits provided by a structured dataset. Let us first understand
the advantages of hygienic data in detail –

Increases Customer Acquisition

An enterprise can boost its customer acquisition efforts by cleansing data. Hygienic
data helps in creating a more accurate prospect list. Marketing to the right
prospects leads to a higher rate of conversion and, therefore, acquisition. Clean
data also ensures better engagement through email marketing as it reduces the
chances of encountering dead email addresses.

Boosts Sales and Revenue

Hygienic data boosts results and ensures a better ROI on marketing campaigns.
Delivering curated content and targeted messages to better-identified audiences
positively impacts sales and also generates a high campaign response rate. Clean
data helps brands correctly identify high-value prospects. This allows brands to
engage them through personalized experiences, thus generating high-value
business.

Improves Decision-Making

Quality customer data is the foundation of effective decision-making for

companies. Yet, countless enterprises fail to prioritize the importance of data quality
management. Businesses need to realize that cleansed data can support precision
analytics. Cleaner the data, more accurate the analysis that will lead to better
marketing strategies and business decisions.

Optimizes Productivity

Data hygiene ensures that employees are making the best use of their work hours
as they do not waste time chasing after unqualified or duplicate leads. Getting rid
of out-of-date information and invalid vendor files improves their productivity and
results. Hygienic data also reduces the risk of fraud as the staff has accurate
customer data when refunds and payments are initiated.

Best Practices for Maintaining Data Hygiene

Before cleaning your data, you need to ask yourself the following two questions –

What are my overall goals and expectations from data cleansing?

How can I execute them?

The overall goals for data cleansing generally are the same as the benefits
mentioned in the section above for most companies. As for the second question, it
can be executed by employing the following practices for maintaining data
hygiene –

Error Monitoring

It is impossible to clean data if you are clueless about what to keep and what to
discard. Create a set of validation rules and begin with auditing your previous and
current customer databases. Get an analyst to identify the inaccuracies that may
include expired addresses, spelling mistakes, etc. Additionally, keep track of the
main source from where the errors are being generated as this will help you fix the
problem by addressing the root of the issue.

Process Standardization
It is crucial to have a uniform template for data at its point of entry. Allowing data
to enter your base in an unstructured manner can reduce efficiency. Standardize
and categorize your data processes by creating a Standard Operating
Procedure(SOP) for your team. This ensures that they follow a set of  prescribed
methods for data acquisition. Doing this will allow only quality data to enter your
CRM for further analysis.

Accuracy Validation

After going through the preliminary stages of a data cleanse, validate its accuracy
in real-time. This can be done by employing data hygiene tools such as list exports
and email list cleaners. You can also use tools that offer email verification.
Utilize data analytics tools to merge various datasets for effective marketing. If you
want, you can still validate your data’s accuracy online without the said tools.
However, this will require investing a lot of man-hours which will reduce the
productivity and efficiency of your marketing department.

Eliminating Duplicity

Duplicate records of customers pose a real challenge as they drive up your

marketing costs. Such records should be scrubbed completely from your database
with the help of different data cleaning tools that can automatically analyze bulk
raw data and flag dupes. Duplicate data can damage your brand’s reputation,
spoil engagement experiences for your customers, and cause inaccurate
reporting.

Appending Data

Once your data has been standardized, validated and scrubbed for duplicates,
use third-party databases to append it. Simply put, data appending means adding
new data elements to the existing database. This enriches your data further by
making it denser. For example – a data appending exercise can be undertaken for
your company’s customer profiles to make them meatier.

Final Thoughts

Working on implementing the aforementioned practices for better data hygiene

will lead to a high-quality email database that can be used to create impactful
marketing campaigns. Clean data is the key to reaching the right audiences in a
way they prefer to be approached. Also, match your desired revenue goals
through data cleansing and enrichment.
 

Author - Debottam Dutta

Debottam Dutta, is the VP for Business Development at Span Global
Services. A technology geek with deep industry knowledge, Debottam
has championed the B2B data space and enabled double digit growth
for global tech enterprises. His business models have inspired partners
globally to embrace data-driven partnerships. Over the last eight years
he has built a reputation for developing the best business strategies,
incubating new business models and expanding partner channels world-wide.