Working with bad data can cost the reputation of a brand or company. Analysts and experts are on the same page, making sure your data is accurate and clean is essential for every marketer. Today we look into a couple of good ways how to maintain our data cleanest.

You are the best marketer when it comes to the creative presentation to your brand, the best storyteller, and having good data means going beyond targeting the right campaigns to the right people. This what we call knowing what you do.

So let us hear the voice of analysts and the market:

• Data decays at a rate of 70% per year. (Biznology)
• $9.7 million per annum is the average financial impact of poor quality data on businesses. (Gartner)
• Workers waste 50% of their time hunting for data, correcting errors and confirming sources for uncertain data. (Harvard Business Review)

Old and obsolete data can also hurt your ability to make informed decisions that help propel your business forward, says an infographic by multichannel marketing services provider Connext Digital. So let us take a look at, how bad data can harm your company and brand.

It kills your marketing campaigns: If your message doesn’t reach the correct people due to the wrong contact information, your campaign lolls apart.

It decreases customer satisfaction and trust in your business: Happy and loyal customers should constantly be given relevant information through the communication channel of their choice.

It damages your brand’s reputation: Accurate data ensures o smooth and effective workflow without bombarding customers due to duplicate contact data.

It affects lead generation: Leads fail due to regularly obsolete data.

It causes an inability to make informed decisions: Accurate data is the key to making informed decisions that propel the business forward.

It leads to missed opportunities: If your marketing efforts are not connecting with and engaging your target customers due to bad data, you ore missing out on opportunities.

Now I know I don’t want all of this to come to my experience. How can I avoid it and what can I do to keep my data clean?

Identify and remove duplicates: Duplicates will inevitably make their way into your database, so you will need to remove or merge with existing leads.

Remove inactive and junk contacts: If leads are inactive or aren’t responding, you may either remove them from your database or keep them with caution.

Aim for uniformity: This is crucial for maintaining a clean database where you won’t leave anything out due to bad data.

Conduct regular audits: Bad data con to lower profitability, which in turn can affect business success, leading to low employee morale.

Automate: To make all tasks involved in data cleansing easier and more effective, automation is key.

In a lot of corporation, big data means to visualize the user journey across all digital channels which can then be used properly in campaigns. It is no secret that this exercise can easily make or break the campaign success. Wrong data, bad data or bad interpretation of data can lead to the wrong results. If you are interested to make your big data work for you, you should partner with someone who can guide you with best practice through the jungle of big data.

Cleaning your data seems to be a trivial task, but needs to be part of your allover digital marketing strategy. Just like the toolbox with a hammer is the data for a marketer the primary tool. Let us know how you successful keep your data clean, or which tools can help you here. Join the conversation in our commenting section below.