What exactly is data hygiene and why is it important to creators
In business, data reigns supreme.
Given the importance of relying on data, it's obvious that clean and accurate data is essential to your business's growth. Inaccurate data - known as dirty data - can lead to unsuccessful attempts to grow.
Thankfully, there's a solution for data hygiene Data hygiene.
In this piece in this post, we'll discuss the storage of data, what data hygiene means and the reasons why it's crucial. Plus, data hygiene best techniques to keep your data squeaky clean and your business flourishing.
What types of databases can store data?
- Contact information
- Demographics information
- Email marketing engagement
- Purchases you made in the past of your goods or products or
- Relevant information on their needs to your products and services
Bigger companies can use a more comprehensive analytical and business intelligence database to access even more data details about their company. As an example, a clothing retailer would record their sales by product SKU and an airline could have data on their flights, or a software as service provider would keep records regarding how clients use different parts of their application. Sometimes, this data gets granular and even whole departments at big companies that maintain databases and analyze the data.
Data hygiene is equally important for both scenarios. Since we're looking at creators in this blog so we'll be focusing on data collected through the CRM.
What exactly is data hygiene?
The process of ensuring data hygiene Data hygiene is the ongoing, continuous procedure to ensure the purity of the data. It means that you're taking care to ensure that it's correct constant, reliable and consistent. Cleaning data prevents companies such as your own from struggling with issues created due to unclean information.
What exactly does it mean to dirty data? The term dirty refers to data when it shows one or more of the following features:
- Information that is duplicated
- Incomplete (think the contact fields are not filled in)
- Invalide
- Incorrectly input
- Typos, misspellings and spelling variants that are multiple
The bottom line - dirty data is wrong.
The scariest thing about filthy information is that it's too easy to introduce errors in the data you store. Whether you input data incorrectly, don't update it regularly or even make an unintentional modification while you're making changes to your system, mistakes can be introduced anytime during your process.
What is the reason data hygiene is vital?
Let's look at the ways that data with dirt can be detrimental to your business, which are the very reasons why maintaining good data is so important.
- It's a waste of money and time.
Poor data can be costly. In the U.S. alone, businesses suffer losses of around $3.1 trillion annually due to inadequate management of data.
It's not just money that's wasted, but also time. An Study by LeadJen research found that sales teams wasted on average 27% of potential sales time using incomplete data. Making the wrong call and calling the wrong person is not enjoyable for any person.
As we know, time equals money , so relying on wrong data is the most sure chance to miss out on revenue.
- Marketing emails and other efforts won't be properly tailored.
In the event that your data isn't up to date or is inaccurate You could send prospective buyers emails or posts that don't align with where they are at in their buyer process.
Such mistakes could damage your relationship with customers and your company's image. This is a double blow.
The worst part is that mistakes like these may cause an increase in email churn rate. Spam reports, unsubscribes as well as hard bounces are a real possibility when you're not adapting your message for your intended audience. All too quickly you'll start seeing your email lists shrinking.
- There is no clear insight into your sale funnel.
Without regularly monitoring and maintaining your database, you'll lack insight into the quality and effectiveness of your funnel to sales. Because of this, it's impossible to answer queries such as:
- What are the number of leads that are qualified available?
- Which leads are you supposed to remove out of your funnel?
- What is your churn rate?
Being able to answer questions like these will help you decide where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. You might even create OKRs (objectives and important performance indicators) based on your very own information!
Dirty data defense: data hygiene best practices
You can see that the negatives of having dirty data can be, well even devastating for your business. Don't fret - data hygiene best practices are available. No matter if your company is day or years old and these practices are applicable at any time in the life of your company. Let's get to it!
- Begin with an audit.
Audits can give you an understanding of your data's big view. It helps you ascertain what metrics are useful and not useful and what information is worse than beneficial. By conducting an audit it will be possible to address questions such as "Which information points do I need to be collected?" as well as "Which sectors are most in need of improvement?".
The audit must determine where problems exist within your data collection and normalization.
- Assess and improve techniques for data collection.
In the course of the audit or following is an ideal time to take a look at each source and the method that data is entered into the systems.
Another consideration is how to minimize manual data entry. Automation tools not only reduce the human error in data entry, but they also allow time to do greater tasks, like making the next big viral TikTok (kidding or do we? ).
- Pay attention to the smallest details.
In our daily lives it is our goal to not sweat the small things - this doesn't ring true with data. Little errors in data could rapidly lead to major issues - like basing a marketing campaign on inaccurate data. Yikes!
When collecting data, make sure that you're following the followingthings:
- Standardizing mailing addresses
- Verifying email addresses
- Standardizing common abbreviations and numbers
When you are aware of the tiny aspects, you'll have the ability to identify larger and significant errors. If you discover a handful of both, you may be able to realize it's time to adopt standard operating procedures, or even simple procedures for gathering and entering data.
- Create an ongoing cleaning process for data.
We're sorry to disappoint you, but your data hygiene process isn't finished after the initial cleanse. It's a continual procedure that requires dedication and determination. Be aware that dirty data can be quickly incorporated into your system - therefore you need to keep an eye on it like a hawk.
A great way to ensure that dirty data at bay is to develop continuous maintenance and consistency procedures. Here are a few suggestions for implementing them:
- Data entry standardization. Each data entry on your system needs to be manually entered in a standard method (especially in the case of manual entry).
- Data errors are handled. Develop rules (even if they're just for yourself) which clearly define the way errors are handled. As an example, how do fix duplicate or inaccurate entries?
- Avoiding the creation of dirty data in the first place. This could be as simple as adding vital fields on your forms to collect data as well as removing unnecessary fields. You can also conduct an annual data audit to ensure that no dirty data is getting back into your company through an old lead generation form as an example.
The most important aspect of data hygiene
The mere fact of having data doesn't suffice to grow your business or direct sales and marketing efforts.
In order to avoid losing money or time as well as customers or even compromising the reputation of your company, your data needs to be complete and error-free. Maintaining your data using proper hygiene procedures ensures that you've got actionable insights your business can use confidently!
We at iData believe that data is the key to success. data and not only for big multi-person businesses however, we believe it is essential for our favourite type of business - those that are run by passionate, single entrepreneurs. We're here to talk with you!