What is data hygiene, and why it's important for creators
In business, data reigns supreme.
With the high stakes that are dependent on data, it's clear why clean, good data is crucial for your business's growth. Unreliable data, also called dirty data can lead to unsuccessful business efforts.
There's hope! - data hygiene.
In this piece in this post, we'll discuss how data is stored, what hygiene means and the reasons why it's crucial. Additionally, you'll learn about the best data hygiene techniques to keep your data squeaky clean and your business flourishing.
What kind of databases store data?
- Contact details
- Demographic data
- Email marketing engagement
- Past purchases of your products or products or
- Details on their requirements that are relevant to your offerings and services
Larger companies may use a more comprehensive analytical and business intelligence database to gain access to more information points about their business. A clothing store would track their products' sales according to SKUs and an airline could have details on their flights or a software as a service firm would collect data on how customers utilize various aspects of their application. Sometime, these data become extremely detailed and even whole groups of large corporations which maintain databases and study the data.
Data hygiene is equally important for both use cases. Since we're looking at the creators of this blog and not on the CRM, we'll concentrate on the data that is collected by a CRM.
What exactly is data hygiene?
Cleanliness of data refers to an ongoing and continuous process to ensure the purity of information. This means you're maintaining data to ensure that it's correct as well as reliable, consistent and stable. Clean data can prevent companies, like your own, from struggling with issues created from dirtier data.
What does it mean to dirt data? Data is deemed dirty when it exhibits any of the following characteristics:
- Duplicate information
- Incomplete (think missing contact fields)
- Older
- Incorrectly entered
- Misspellings, typos, as well as multiple spelling variations
The most important thing to remember is that dirty data is incorrect.
The scariest thing about filthy information is that it's too easy to introduce errors in the data you store. When you input data improperly and don't keep it updated regularly, or make an accidental change while making changes to your system, mistakes can be introduced at any point in your procedure.
Why is data hygiene crucial?
Let's look at the ways that data with dirt could affect your company. These are the very reasons why maintaining excellent data is vital.
- Then you'll be wasting money and time.
Poor data can cost you. In the U.S. alone, businesses lose roughly $3.1 trillion each year due to inadequate management of data.
There's more than just money wasted, but also time. The Study by LeadJen research found that sales personnel wasted average 27% of the potential selling time utilizing dirty information. Making the wrong call and getting the wrong number isn't an enjoyable experience for anyone.
However, as we know, time equals cash, and so following poor data is an assured chance to miss out on revenues.
- Emails and other marketing campaigns won't have the proper tailoring.
If your database isn't current with the latest information or has been erroneously updated You could send prospective buyers emails or content that doesn't correspond with their current position on the buying journey.
The kind of mistakes that are made could tarnish both your customer relationship as well as your brand's reputation. This is a double blow.
What's worse - missteps such as these could result in an increased email churn rate. Unsubscribes, spam reports, as well as hard bounces are an option if you're not adapting your message according to the needs of your target audience. In no time, you'll begin seeing your email lists dwindling.
- There is no clear insight into your selling funnel.
In the absence of regularly reviewing and maintaining your database, you'll lack insight into the quality and effectiveness of your funnel to sales. Due to this, you'll be unable to respond to questions such as:
- What are the number of leads that are qualified out there?
- Which leads do you want to eliminate out of your funnel?
- How much is your churn?
Knowing the accurate answer to questions like these will help to determine the best places to focus your sales and marketing efforts. It is possible to create OKRs (objectives and key outcomes) based on your very own data!
Dirty data defense: data hygiene best practices
It's clear that the downsides of dirty data could be, downright devastating to your business. But, never fear - data hygiene best practices can be found here. Whether your business is a one-day or even a few years old the best practices for data hygiene are applicable at any time within the history of your business. It's time to get going!
- Start with an audit.
A thorough audit can give you an understanding of your data's big image. This helps determine what metrics are useful and not helpful and also what data can be less beneficial than it is. Through an audit, you'll be able to answer questions like "Which data points are needed in order to make a decision?" and "Which areas are in most need of improvement?".
In essence, an audit will find out where issues are occurring in the data collection process and also regularization.
- Improve and assess techniques for data collection.
In the course of the audit or following is the best moment to examine at every source and method that data is entered into the systems.
Another thing to consider is how you can minimize manual data entry. Automation tools not only reduce mistakes in the data entry process, they free up time for other tasks that are more crucial - such as designing your next popular TikTok (kidding or are we? ).
- Pay attention to the smallest details.
While in life, we try not to sweat the small things - it's not the case with information. Data errors that aren't so obvious can quickly lead to huge problems, like creating a marketing strategy based upon inaccurate information. Yikes!
When collecting data, make sure that you're following the followingthings:
- Standardizing mailing addresses
- Verifying email addresses
- The standardization of common abbreviations and number
If you pay attention to the smallest details, you'll be able to identify larger and significant errors. If you discover a handful of these, you might realize that you need to implement more uniform operating practices or procedures for gathering and entering data.
- Create an ongoing data cleansing process.
Sorry to say, but your data hygiene process isn't finished following the initial clean-up. This is a continuous task that demands the commitment of a person and their determination. Keep in mind that dirty information can be quickly incorporated into your systems , so it is important to watch out for it with a keen eye.
An excellent way to keep clean data from being a problem is to implement ongoing maintenance and uniformity processes. Below are some of the ones that we would recommend:
- Data entry standardization. Each data entry in your system should be entered in a consistent way (especially in the case of manual entry).
- The handling of data errors. Create procedures (even even if they're only for yourself) which clearly define how to handle errors. As an example, how do you remedy incorrect or duplicate entries?
- Preventing dirty data in the initial place. In practice, this may include adding important fields on your data collection forms as well as removing unnecessary fields. You can also conduct regular data audits to make sure that dirty data isn't getting back into your company through an old lead generation form, such as.
Data hygiene's bottom line
Data alone isn't enough to grow your business or direct sales and marketing efforts.
In order to avoid losing money as well as time and clients as well as threatening the reputation of your company Your data must be complete and error-free. Maintaining your data using the highest standards of hygiene will ensure that you have relevant information that you will be able to use with confidence!
At , we are believers that data is the key to success. data, and not just for huge multi-person businesses, but for our favorite type of business , those run by single, passionate entrepreneurs. We're here to talk with you!