DAVE, our ever-helpful Data Cleaning robot, spends all of his time poring through client’s sales and marketing data and improving it so that it becomes a far more usable and valuable asset to their business.
DAVE wants to share his hard-won experience with you and has pulled together his top ‘dirty dozen’ of data disasters, which directly disrupt your day-to-day delivery of sales and marketing duties.
Over the next 12 posts, we’ll be breaking down each of the 12 dastardly data disasters for you, so that you know what to look for and what to avoid – the last thing you want is for your day to be dragged down by lousy sales and marketing data.
We’re kicking off with #1: Marketing List Duplicates galore! How to prevent Audience Fatigue
Audience fatigue is at an all-time high. Communication by email is a pretty broken channel because we marketers have so badly abused it via the unreliable marketing data that we house in our CRM’s and marketing automation systems.
Much of your business might stem from the email contacts you acquire. Among your hard-earned list of business contacts, however, might be a host of variations of the same contact names and the same company names. As an example, you may have the same contact listed multiple times, simply because they have different email addresses or are listed under different versions of the company name. Another scenario might have you sending the same information to the same person twice, because they have email accounts at two different companies. Even though an email hasn’t bounced it doesn’t mean they are still at the company…
It happens all the time and the end result is ‘email fatigue’. A number of email addresses that ‘look’ like they are going to different people are, in fact, all going to the same person. The recipient gets understandably fed up with what they may see as ‘spam’ and unsubscribes.
The solution? Simple. By getting DAVE to check your sales and marketing lists and regularize the variations of the contact names and the company names and flag the possible duplicates for you, the whole situation can be avoided through a simple manual clean-up.
Next post: Resolving screwy contact names.
