Email marketing campaigns: the importance of good data

When it comes to marketing, the impact of a good email campaign cannot be underestimated. But have you taken a moment to consider how your data might be skewing your results?

Not investing time into regularly cleansing your data can result in wasted valuable budget.

What is data cleansing?

The idea that data can become dirty may seem like a novel concept, but the truth is that unclean data can have far-reaching consequences. A database that is full of duplicate contacts or invalid email addresses will have a direct impact on your conversion rate, and the way in which your contacts interact with your company.

Data cleansing is the act of meticulously working your way through your data and ensuring that all of your records are valid and up to date, and that you’re not holding any data that no longer serves a purpose to yourself or to the individual that it belongs to.

Why do it?

Cleansing your data may feel like a daunting and time-consuming task, but it’s integral to the success of your marketing efforts. Say your email platform doesn’t have the functionality to recognise duplicate contacts, you could potentially flood a contact’s inbox with the same email over and over again, with the possible outcome of damaging the company’s relationship with that individual. Equally, if an email address has been incorrectly entered into the database, a contact who wants to hear from you might be missing out on key offers and touchpoints and could potentially take their business elsewhere.

Not having clean data will negatively impact your sales.

The process

So, we know why data cleansing is so important, now comes the doing. Here’s a few pointers to get you on your way to a clean marketing database:

• Identify unsubscribes and delete them from your database, but only if they are unengaged from the company – if they’ve unsubscribed but your sales team has qualified them as a lead, it might be worth keeping hold of their data.
• Remove fake email addresses – to do this, you first need to identify whether they’re fake or just bouncing due to strict spam filters. A truly fake email address will usually have bounced on the first ever attempt to send an email, and there will be no re-engagement from the intended recipient.
• Check for errors – it’s worth checking your bounced list to see if the reason for the bounce is human-error. For example, it’s easy to miss the ‘.’ in ‘co.uk’ and also easy to rectify.
• Make sure that your fields are being used correctly – sometimes the temptation to take shortcuts with data entry is too much, and information can end up in the incorrect field, creating difficulties when it comes to automation and extracting the right data.
• Merge duplicate contacts – no one wants their inbox filled up with duplicate emails, make sure that you only have one contact record per person.

Moving forwards

Now you’ve taken the time to clean your data, I’m sure that the idea of having to set aside more time to do it all over again is somewhat unappealing. Unfortunately, the need to regularly clean data is inevitable, however, there are a number of processes that you can put in place to make it a less laborious task:

• Introduce drop-down menus - by replacing text fields with fixed menus, you protect your data from human error.
• Have singular purpose fields – for example, have a field for first name and last name so you have the ability to filter or search by either, or use them to personalise emails.
• Delete unused fields – removing unnecessary fields will make exporting data easier, and make finding the information that you need a lot quicker.
• Create mandatory fields, so that a value has to be put in certain fields before a contact can be added to your system.
• Use a CRM that can be integrated with your email platform, or better yet, use a platform that has the functionality to do both! 

Dedicating time and resources to cleaning up your data is key to a successful email marketing campaign, and implementing a CRM system that helps you keep it that way is invaluable. The HubSpot CRM has the functionality to make keeping your data clean a much simpler process. Why not schedule a chat with one of the team to see how we can help support you in your journey to better data and a more functional CRM?