Data Hygiene 101: Successful Marketing Starts with Clean Data

The foundation of any successful marketing campaign is clean data. At first glance, it may not seem like a huge deal if there are a few contacts here and there with inaccurate information. But those inaccuracies can add up and undermine your marketing efforts.

It’s estimated that contact data decays at a rate of up to 25% a year, and it’s even higher if your contacts work in Silicon Valley. Roles change, people retire or join other companies, companies get acquired or change names.

If you’re not keeping up with those changes, it can sabotage your marketing campaigns.

If you have a contact list that’s riddled with duplicates, unengaged contacts, hard bounces from inaccurate or out-of-date emails addresses, then the consequences can be far-reaching.

Email service providers take a hard look at metrics like engagement level, bounce backs, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. If you have contacts in your database who just aren't that into you, it will affect your email sender reputation. A poor sender score increases the likelihood that those ESPs will reroute your emails to the spam folder, and fewer of your contacts will receive your messages. Even those who look forward to your communications.

Also, if you’ve implemented segmentation into your campaign strategies, having contacts in out-of-date roles means that those messages are going to the wrong people.

It affects data analytics, too. For instance, let’s say that 25% of the emails in your contact database is out of date. You run an email marketing campaign that results in a 10% response rate. But if 1 in 4 didn’t actually receive the email, that means that your actual response rate was 13.33%.

You won’t truly know how successful your marketing efforts are unless you’re working with clean data.

So you can see why regular data hygiene is the essential starting point of any successful campaign strategy. Fortunately, our partners over at Sojourn Solutions put together a blog post that includes strategies for cleaning your contact database, as well as tips for keeping it clean.

To learn how emailing less frequently can boost engagement and your bottom line, check out this article.

Want to see how Motiva can make the most of your clean data? Schedule a demo!