3 Tips for Optimizing Your Database Hygiene
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More than ever, successful commerce relies on the use of data. Anybody working in an organization with customers today knows the headaches that poor database hygiene can cause. Data, so crucial to the operation of almost all modern companies, has a habit of building up. There is a growing crisis of accumulation across the board. This data clog hinders the smooth running of marketing campaigns, the safeguarding of customer information, and cybersecurity. Poor data hygiene manifests itself in a number of ways. Duplicates, corrupted files, data unrelated to the market or region, and old data all seriously reduce the effectiveness of a database.
According to Forbes, poor data hygiene accounts for a 12% loss in many companies’ overall profits. Accordingly, sorting out data hygiene within your company could be a massive step forward. We have compiled three tips to help you give that data a good check-up.
Streamline Your Data Acquisition
It’s a good idea to make sure that you only acquire appropriate data from the start. This will cut down on any future cleaning and ensure that your business is fighting fit. Data acquisition is one of the key challenges that modern businesses face, and it isn’t always very straightforward. Lead Lists can produce marketing data lists that can be purchased in order to instantly build the foundations for a good database. These lists are often available with custom parameters: locality, age range, gender, and preferences. We wouldn’t advise using this strategy alone. Purchased lead lists are a great way to hygienically build your database. But a hybrid method of lead list purchasing and careful data collection often works best.
Make sure you develop a firm set of rules and parameters for your data acquisition process. In this way, unwanted data won’t be collected in the first place!
Automate the cleaning of databases
Automation is a buzz word these days, but there is some confusion as to where automatic processes do the most good. The laborious work of database cleaning is one place where automated processes can be extremely time-effective and save your company a huge amount of money.
Data cleaning is finally being automated on a large scale. Your IT staff (or yourself, depending on the size of your business) will breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that they no longer have to manually sift through your data removing duplicates.
Make Sure Everybody Uses the Same Database
This might seem like an obvious point. But data hygiene is severely compromised when more than one database is being used in a company. This can occur when two departments develop separate collections of data – for instance, marketing and sales. This creates potentially thousands of duplicates and can seriously drive customers away. If they are being contacted by multiple departments. Restructure your data: make sure everybody is updating and using the same database.
Aside from the obvious benefit of eliminating duplicates, demolishing the ‘organizational silos’ within your company will keep everybody on the same page and ultimately empower all departments with a bigger and more accurate single pool of data.
