Data hygiene is an important part of the data enrichment services for your business. In this blog post, we will outline ways to make your internal data hygiene process more efficient and beneficial to your business.
From facilitating important business decisions to mitigating risk associated with collecting sensitive personal information, companies of any size need to be aware of the power and liability of their data. Databases are highly dynamic, so the quality of a company’s data constantly changes. If you’re not constantly purging the decayed data, it is likely that your data is outdated at a rate faster than you may think. Most CRM systems are estimated to suffer data decay of 25% to 30% annually. This can cause harm in sales performance and hurt your company in the long run.
Marketers know that data is an important resource, and because of this they must protect it as much as possible. They must collect relevant and useful data, even though collecting data can be challenging. They must also ensure that the data is hygienic. Over time, they must routinely check the data spread across different internal systems and ensure that the databases they use for marketing, sales and analysis are accurate and up-to-date.
Efficient Business with Better Data
Make Data Integrity a Priority
Data integrity means that you can trust the data you have collected without a shadow of a doubt for future use and analysis. This implies that your data is accurate and consistent. And it should not be altered in any way unless routine data enrichment services and data enhancement solutions are being used by your company.
The integrity of your data should never be questioned. It should always be deemed as trustworthy and reliable. If the integrity of your data is compromised, you must do everything possible to rectify the situation. Since data is an important part of many marketing processes, you must use reliable data to perform these actions.
Data integrity depends a lot on how the data is collected. Your company should have standards and protocols to ensure that the data you collect is valid and trustworthy. If this is not the case, you should update your internal collection process to ensure data validity. This will increase the integrity of your data in the long run and make it more useful for your company.
Standardize Your Data
When checking to see if your data is hygienic, you must first examine current data standards. If your company uses multiple software programs to collect and analyze data, you must ensure that they all have the same data definitions stored within them.
For example, say you have one tool that collects potential customer’s names from a lead magnet form, and another that tracks their names. In one piece of software, the potential customer’s name is separated into two columns for first name and last name. In the other, the whole name is recorded in one column. In both instances, the data is correct, but the lack of standardization can lead to confusion and problems once your company tries to analyze the data and use it later on.
Our suggestion is to go into all the data collection and tracking tools that your organization uses and standardize the data collection. This will simplify your data in the long run and make it easier for you to use it in meaningful ways.
Perform Data Cleansing
Once your data collection is standardized, you must work to cleanse existing data. You want to ensure that you remove duplicate data or get rid of data that is outdated and no longer useful. For example, companies should perform email validation to ensure the emails in their database are legitimate and real. This can be a difficult mountain to climb, but data cleansing is necessary to increase the reliability of your data.
Duplicate data is the most common form of data that needs to be cleansed. This is a critical part of data cleansing because duplicate data can skew large data sets if they exist within your system.
You can work on cleansing your data yourself by aggregating, filtering and merging data into a single database and analyzing it from there. If you have too much data to do this effectively on your own, you can always seek out cleansing services from FrescoData. Our team contains experts who are unique positioned to take outdated and disorganized data and cleanse it to make it more meaningful.
Securely Back Up Your Data
While you should stockpile your data, it is important to routinely back it up. This is a critical part of a data hygiene strategy. The point of backing up your data is to ensure your company avoids any permanent losses in data. Data can be stored on-site on servers dedicated for this purpose, or they can be stored on the cloud. The way you store your data depends on how much data you have, and the cost associated with backups.
FrescoData generally recommends backing up your data at least once every 6 months. If your company collects large amounts of data, it may be more beneficial for you to back it up more frequently than that. Reach out to one of our expert consultants to gain insight on the right back up strategy for your business.
Maintain Executive Approval
A data hygiene strategy is an important part of your business. Therefore, it is key for executive management and other leaders within your company to be an active champion of data hygiene. They should be dedicated to prioritizing the integrity of your data. This approval can help your entire organization learn about the importance of data hygiene and make it meaningful.
The process for developing data hygiene practices can sometimes be quite cumbersome, so getting your whole organization involved and onboard is critical for maintaining clean data over time.
Data Enrichment Services are Important Too
Once you are sure that your internal processes collect clean, trustworthy data, you can shift your priority to improving the data your collect. Data enrichment services help organizations take current data, assess its validity, and tweak it to make it more meaningful. From time to time these data audits should happen. They can help you explore what data sets you collect are meaningful, which are not, and which you should collect in the future to draw more insights about your potential customers. Everything from email validation to address verification take place in typical enhancement procedures. You can perform these audits on your own, or you can trust teams like ours at FrescoData to enhance your data for you. We can also append your current data with new information, so your team can gain new insights about your customers without reaching out to them directly for more information.
This process will improve the quality of your data-driven marketing and sales.
