Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices
ReadyContacts is a marketing database optimization company. ReadyContacts solutions help you build & maintain a highly accurate and relevant marketing database that delivers significantly improved campaign response rates for sales & marketing. ReadyContacts is the only player in the market with proprietary software solutions to build unparalleled accuracy and completeness in marketing databases.
7 Simple Do’s To Maintaining A Clean CRM Database
A pet peeve for anyone in marketing or sales who has to work with CRM data while setting up their direct mail or other outbound campaigns is bad data. While there are great features when it comes to hosted CRMs like Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, you will only realize the full potential of these CRM if you maintain clean data. A poorly maintained database results in lots & lots of inefficiency whether you need to run reports for analytics or even a simple task like printing out addresses for a direct mail campaign. With multiple access and data pouring in from several sources, CRM database maintenance is not as simple as it may seem. It needs a disciplined ‘every day’ process and consistent effort from all of those who use it. Here are a few simple Do’s to maintain a clean database:
- Do make sure you enter only the data you need into your CRM and filter out what looks like junk right at the start. Many have a habit of dumping entire excel or csv sheets of leads, accounts and contact data which hasn’t been screened before upload for junk data which may be completely unnecessary
- Do run your data through a normalization process and format all the data well in the csv file or sheet before you upload it to your CRM. It’s a lot quicker and it can save you from having to access several accounts and check the data online once it has already been assigned to various user accounts and campaigns
- Do label all campaigns and sets of uploaded data items with a standard company wide naming convention which is clearly understood by users and ensures that every record is assigned correctly. As simple as it may seem, a lot of accounts have data that is simply uploaded and in time nobody knows to which source it came from, which campaign it belongs to or whose lead it is
- Do follow a standard convention across all users for entering data such as account names, postal addresses, job titles etc. It standardizes formats and makes things easier while printing reports or direct mail campaigns
- Do look for missing data elements like a missing phone number or missing zip code in the address preferably before uploading the data or at least while entering an individual record. Appending missing data at an earlier stage when there are fewer records to handle is a lot easier than having to go through the entire database and then look for whats missing
- Do ensure that users update the status of a company, lead or opportunity every time some activity is performed. If these are not updated the reports run on this data will yield inaccurate results
- Do run regular audits for data quality and carry out a data cleansing effort periodically (at least once every quarter). If you can do it more frequently, there will be less data which needs to be updated or cleansed and the data will stay in better shape
Good data in. Good data out. Its that simple!
Related posts:
- B2B Sales Contact Database & List Verification: Cut Costs Now!
- Do you sell to Salesforce.com customers? Do you know who to sell to?
- List. List. List. First, Define Who You Are Looking For.
- 3 Things To Do Before You Upload Trade Show Lists To Your CRM
- B2B Direct Marketing Lists: Right Place & Right Person
September 8th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
This is a great summary of simple action items that marketers ought to enforce to keep their CRM working for them and not the other way round.
November 10th, 2009 at 3:25 am
i have posted your blog on my site
respect
shavin clark
______________________________________________
November 12th, 2009 at 12:12 am
where do i get more information on this
respect
pamela kheo
______________________________________________
November 13th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
i have posted your blog on my site
Thanks
anne shavin
______________________________________________
May 3rd, 2010 at 10:54 am
Do you have a de-dupe tool for users doing several uploads of disparate lists?
May 16th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
These are some great points. A CRM can only be as good as the data that users enter into the system. It is important to implement good practices and train users to enter clean information into the CRM. For additional information on CRM for small and medium sized businesses, Intelestream has helpful whitepapers at http://www.intelestream.net/whitepapers.
May 17th, 2010 at 2:26 am
These are some great points. A CRM can only be as good as the data that users enter into the system. It is important to implement good practices and train users to enter clean information into the CRM. For additional information on CRM for small and medium sized businesses, Intelestream has helpful whitepapers at http://www.intelestream.net/whitepapers.
June 26th, 2010 at 6:41 am
I agree with you…only with the customer confidential perception a concern will stand up..that is the only entry for the strong capability in the field.keep sharing.
September 22nd, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Most often, the cleaning needs to happen long before import. It’s actually faster to “clean” in Excel than in some of these CRM softwares.
October 1st, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Welcome First time skipped right here on your site, founde on ASK. Thanks for the fast response. Your info was very element and knowledgeable.
November 16th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Exactly how I personally view it is comparable to what you’ve got said, but you might have mentioned some things i always would’ve omitted. I appreciate you for penning this post. I’m going to share this with several of my close friends.
June 22nd, 2011 at 3:13 am
Thanks for the tips. This really helps me a lot because we are using CRM applications in our company.
Mike Madigan | name numerology
August 8th, 2011 at 9:42 am
Thanks for sharing this post with us. It’s really an amazing post. Keep posting the good work in future too.
MERCHANT CASH ADVANCE
August 18th, 2011 at 10:33 am
Thanks for sharing this post with us. It’s really an amazing post. Keep posting the good work in future too.
Small Business Loans
October 17th, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Wow!Now this is hghly recommeded post for me. I will surely email this to my friend.
January 17th, 2012 at 5:49 am
Excellent blog! I genuinely love how it’s easy on my eyes as well as the details is well written. I am wondering how I might be notified whenever a new post has been made. I have subscribed to your rss feed which should do the trick! Have a nice day!