Data organization is efficient and essential to keeping contact with customers and minimizing storage needs. Cleaning up your customer database will help you create a better customer experience by fine-tuning your single customer view. A valuable and stable customer database can help increase productivity, but incorrect information is useless to your team at every level. Data management can help you clean up your act and get the best return on your investment from your customer database. Doing things like; removing fake contacts, using style sheets, and creating alert systems, improves your database and creates a space for new, active customers.
Contacts that have been inactive for an extended period should be removed to free up space for new customers. When reviewing inactive customers, it’s important to look at why they’re idle. What is it about your current marketing strategy that’s causing your customers not to respond? Could they have switched companies or brands? It’s not recommended to endlessly pursue uninterested customers, however, sending out an email asking them to update their information and including a section on why they no longer wish to be a part of the email list will prove to be useful.
Not every customer is super keen on using their personal email address for a one-off time. As a result, many contact databases fill up with fake or junk contact information consisting of email addresses that go nowhere. These fake contacts are a waste of resources and can clog up your customer database system. Your CRM system should be sophisticated enough to search and identify false contacts while allowing you to remove them quickly.
One of the best ways to maintain your customer database is through uniformity and consistency. With data entry, it’s easy to get a variety of different styles, unless a uniformed drop-down menu is utilized. For example, if you’re collecting data on the country your customer is in, different people will write the country differently, i.e., US vs. U.S vs. U.S.A, vs. United States vs. United States of America, etc. As a result, you’re likely to miss out on valuable customers because of the lack of uniformity. Going through and cleaning out the different variations of the same information, and merging them while creating style sheets, can help keep things organized.
Some customers have the same first and last names but different email and home addresses. If you’re manually going through and cleaning up, you may accidentally delete valuable customers, under the assumption that the same first and last name are duplicates. By setting up an alert system, you are notified when a duplicate appears and can manually check whether or not it’s an actual duplicate or if it’s just someone with similar information.
With every dispatched email campaign, you’ll find some emails bounce back, some individuals choose to opt-out, and others interact with the email. When you discover this information, utilize the bounce backs and opt-outs to clean your database. While spring cleaning is one way to clean up your database, regular maintenance makes things easier and saves you time, money, and your business’ reputation.
Ensure that your utilizing your efforts and placing them where they’re best suited and needed by maintaining your customer database. There’s no quick and easy shortcut to cleaning up your customer database. However, relieving your database of errors, false contacts, and other unwanted information, will give you better data results and renew your confidence in your data. This will ultimately inspire you to create better-focused campaigns, products, and services for your customer base.
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