What exactly is data hygiene and why it's important for creators
In business, data reigns supreme.
Given the importance of relying upon data, it's easy to see the reason why good, clean data is crucial for the success of a company. Inaccurate data - called dirty data could lead to a failure in business efforts.
There's hope! for data hygiene data hygiene.
In this article this article, we'll look at how data is stored, what hygiene is , and what it's importance. Additionally, you'll learn about the best data hygiene practices to ensure you're keeping your data in good order and your company thriving.
What kind of databases can store data?
- Contact details
- Demographic data
- Email marketing engagement
- Purchases you made in the past of your goods or products or
- Information on their needs relevant to your offerings and services
Larger companies may make use of a larger business intelligence and analytics database to gain access to more information points about their business. For example, a clothing store would track their sales by SKU of the product or a flight company would record information on flights, or a software-as-a service company would record data on how customers utilize various aspects of their software. Sometimes, this data gets more specific as well, and there are entire groups of large corporations which maintain databases and study the information.
The importance of data hygiene is equal for both scenarios. But since we're focusing on authors in this article and not on the CRM, we'll concentrate on the information gathered by a CRM.
What exactly is data hygiene?
Cleanliness of data refers to the ongoing, continuous procedure of ensuring the cleanliness of the data. It means that you're taking care in order to make sure it's reliable as well as reliable, consistent and stable. The cleaning of data helps prevent businesses similar to yours from struggling with issues created due to dirty data.
What exactly does it mean to dirty data? It is considered dirty data if it exhibits any of the following characteristics:
- Duplicate information
- Incomplete (think absence of contact fields)
- Outdated
- Incorrectly input
- Typos, misspellings and multiple spelling variations
The most important thing to remember is that dirty data is wrong.
The worst thing about filthy information is that it's too easy to introduce errors into your data. When you input data improperly and don't keep it updated regularly, or make an accidental modification while you're upgrading your system, problems could be introduced anytime during your procedure.
What is the reason data hygiene is important?
Now, let's explore the ways that data with dirt can be detrimental to your business, which are just a few of the reasons why keeping accurate data is essential.
- Then you'll be wasting your time and money.
Data that is not clean will cost you. In the U.S. alone, businesses lose roughly $3.1 trillion annually due to ineffective data management.
The issue isn't just that money gets wasted, but also time. A study by LeadJen research found that sales teams wasted on an average of 27% of their potential selling time utilizing dirty information. Making the wrong call and reaching the wrong person isn't enjoyable for any person.
However, as we know, time equals cash, and so following wrong data is the most sure method of losing revenues.
- Marketing emails and other efforts won't be properly tailored.
When your information isn't kept up and current or inaccurate You could send prospective buyers emails or content that doesn't match where they're in the buyer journey.
The kind of mistakes that are made could damage your relationship with customers and your company's image. The result is an absolute double-whammy.
What's worse - missteps like these may cause an increase in email churn rate. Spam reports, unsubscribes as well as hard bounces are a real possibility when you don't tailor your content for your intended audience. In no time, you'll begin to notice your list of email subscribers diminishing.
- It's not possible to gain complete insight into the sale funnel.
In the absence of regularly reviewing and maintaining your database, you'll lack insight into the quality of your sales funnel. Due to this, it's impossible to answer queries such as:
- How many qualified leads are there?
- What leads should you remove out of your funnel?
- What is your churn rate?
Being able to answer such questions will assist you decide where to invest sales and marketing efforts. You might even create OKRs (objectives and key performance indicators) using your own data!
Dirty data defense: data hygiene best practices
As you can see, the downsides of dirty data can be, well absolutely devastating to the business. But, never fear that the most effective data hygiene practices are available. Whether your business is a day or years old and these practices can be applied at any time in the life of your business. It's time to get going!
- Begin with an audit.
Audits can provide you with an overview of your data's overall image. It will help you determine which metrics are useful and not helpful and also what data can be worse than beneficial. By conducting an audit, you'll be able to address questions such as "Which information points do I need?," and "Which sectors are most in need of improvements?".
Essentially, the audit should find out where issues are occurring in your data collection , and the standardization.
- Improve and assess data collection methods.
During the audit or after is the best time to take a look at every source and method through which information enters your system.
A second consideration is to make data entry as simple as possible. Automated tools do not just reduce mistakes in the data entry process, they allow time to do other tasks that are more crucial - such as creating the next viral TikTok (kidding or is it? ).
- Pay attention to the small specifics.
In our daily lives it is our goal to not be concerned about small details - this doesn't ring true with information. Data errors that aren't so obvious can quickly lead to huge issues - like the basis of a marketing campaign based upon inaccurate information. Yikes!
In data collection, ensure that you are doing the following:
- Standardizing mailing addresses
- Verifying email addresses
- Common abbreviations, numbers and common abbreviations
If you pay attention to the smallest aspects, you'll have the ability to catch larger, important mistakes. If you spot a couple of both, you may realize that you need to implement more standard operating procedures, or even simple rules for collecting and inputting information.
- Create an ongoing cleanse of data.
Sorry to say, but your data hygiene process isn't finished after the initial cleanse. This is a continuous task that demands commitment and perseverance. Keep in mind that dirty information can be quickly incorporated into your systems - so you must watch out for the data like a hawk.
A great way to ensure that dirt-laden data out of your system is to create ongoing maintenance and uniformity methods. Here are a few suggestions for implementing them:
- Data entry standardization. Every data point in your system should be manually entered in a consistent way (especially when manually entered).
- The handling of data errors. Create guidelines (even when they're not intended to yourself) with clear guidelines for how to handle errors. In other words, how can fix duplicate or inaccurate entries?
- Avoiding the creation of dirty data in the beginning. This could look like adding essential fields to the forms for data collection as well as removing unnecessary fields. Additionally, you may perform regular data audits to ensure that no dirty data is creeping back into your business through an old lead generation form as an example.
Data hygiene's bottom line
The mere fact of having data doesn't suffice to expand your business, or direct sales and marketing efforts.
To avoid losing revenue as well as time and clients or even compromising the reputation of your company, your data needs to be complete and error-free. Maintaining your data using hygiene practices ensures you have useful insights that your company can use confidently!
We at iData are believers that data is the key to success. information, and not just for large multi-person corporations as well as for our most favorite type of business - those that are run by passionate, single entrepreneurs. We're talking to you!