The amount of data corporations have on hand is growing by an estimated 40% a year. This growth is tainted however because 20% of that data is estimated to be polluted, which costs companies millions. In fact, research firm Gartner estimates that the cost of this polluted data is over 14 million dollars annually. The benefits of having clean, accurate data cannot be over-stated. Increased productivity, accurate reporting, informed decision-making and scalability are just a few of the reasons marketing departments are allocating more of their budgets to data and analytics than ever before. However, if you don’t address the quality of your data, you won’t be able to realize these types of benefits.
These are the telltale signs to look for to tell if your data’s gone bad.
According to Gal Steinberg, VP of API Partnerships at Data Axle, empty form fields in your CRM are the blaring red alarm that your data quality is in the tank. If your accounts are missing key information, your sales team can’t pitch them and the entry is meaningless. Perform a randomized spot check of a few different accounts and see how many have missing data. That should give you more insights into how severe your data gaps are.
Mailchimp defines a ‘hard bounce’ as an undeliverable email. Check in with your digital marketers to see what their hard bounce rate is. Every campaign will have some hard bounces, but if your campaigns consistently have a hard bounce rate of over 2%, it’s a sign of a much deeper problem with your data.
If you are getting high amounts of unsubscribes or spam complaints from your lists, it might mean that you are sending irrelevant content to your target audience. Over 90% of consumers complain they receive advertising offers that are irrelevant to them on a regular basis. If you are sending audiences irrelevant content, chances are you have bad data on their key interests or areas of focus.
“Poor-quality data is a huge problem,” Bruce Rogers, chief insights officer at Forbes Media, noted in releasing a report in May on the explosion of bad data. “It leaves many companies trying to navigate the Information Age in the equivalent of a horse and buggy.”
In a recent Forrester study, 65% of sales and marketing professionals surveyed agreed that their organization struggled to maintain the quality of data in their CRM, and 25% said the CRM has been overly disruptive to processes used by front line workers. Are your sales and marketing teams complaining about your CRM? Are they wasting time doing menial tasks such as data entry and trying to track down the information to fill those empty form fields? If so, your data is past due for a tune-up. Unhappy employees and less engaged and less productive. Don’t risk losing a high performer because of something as fixable as bad data.
Your data should add up to more than the sum of its’ parts. If your data isn’t translating into actions that will increase sales and maximize ROI, then you don’t understand your data, and your data isn’t working. A recent Oracle whitepaper summed up the problem of bad data thusly, “If a CRM system does not have a clean data foundation, algorithms based on that data will give unreliable results. Even the very best algorithms cannot deliver valuable insights when they are built on bad underlying data.”
Data needs to be clean in order to paint a picture of what your potential customers look like, how to reach them and what messaging they need to hear in order to increase conversions.
Real-time data enrichment can fix the adverse effects of polluted data. The business world is constantly changing. Today’s global economy means businesses are constantly growing, merging, changing and moving. Traditional static databases aren’t aligned with today’s business models. The time of stagnant, unchanging databases is ending. Many businesses are investing in real-time data management services and solutions. Data Axle integrates seamlessly into existing CRMs, including Salesforce, in order to enrich existing data in real-time.
Learn more about real-time data enrichment – contact us.
As Content Marketing Manager, Natasia is responsible for helping strategize, produce and execute Data Axle's content. With a passion for writing and an enthusiasm for data management and technology, Natasia creates content that is designed to deliver nuggets of wisdom to help brands and individuals elevate their data governance policies. A native New Yorker, when Natasia is not at work she can be found enjoying New York’s food scene, at one of NYC’s many museums, or at one of the city’s many parks with her two teacup yorkies.