Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Amanda Nelson, Director of Marketing at RingLead, where she leads the content marketing strategy and execution. She has spent the last three years in content marketing and community management at salesforce.com and Radian6, and has a background in account management for interactive and full service advertising agencies. Follow her on Twitter at @amandalnelson.
Even if you’re the best marketer in the world using stellar practices, over time, your contact data will decay. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American worker changes jobs about every 4.5 years. They get promoted, or terminated, or they simply get a better offer elsewhere. That translates to about 1.85% monthly change at each company.
The data in your CRM that’s likely to change over time for each prospect may include:
• Change in title/promotion
• Change in working location
• Change of phone number
• Add mobile phone number
• Change of department
• Change of area code
• Change in email domain
• Change in company name
• Change in company website
• Merger or acquisition
Overall, about 12% of your data, on average, will change each year. As just one example, 75 phone numbers change every 30 minutes.
Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to maintain a purring marketing database. Here are three helpful steps.
Cleaning Data with Marketing Automation
Dirty data can easily enter your marketing automation system, for example, if you have a web form built in a marketing automation platform, leads will enter their information into that form.
Let’s say a contact completed a form on your website a month ago. Today, that same contact submits another web form with a different email address. This creates a duplicate in your marketing automation system.
With these two email addresses for one person, your marketing automation system is going to send two records into your CRM. Duplicate records in your CRM causes extra work for sales teams, costing valuable time that could be spent selling. A duplicate prevention platform will not only check marketing automation systems, but it will check your CRM and find that month-old record. Instead of creating a duplicate, it will merge it with the record in your CRM and the record in your marketing automation platform.
Top Five Reasons to Invest in Keeping Your Data Clean
Keeping your marketing automation database clean is an important part of administering it. If your data is dirty, then your job as a marketing manager becomes a whole lot harder.
For more strategies on how to leverage the data in your marketing arsenal, download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management.