4 Ways to Ensure the Quality of your Data

Whenever a client asks me “where do we begin?”, the answer is almost always “with your data.” Data is king and the quality of it in your marketing automation platform (MAP) will dictate the trajectory of your campaigns and quality of leads. If your data is accurate, timely, and enriched you will be better able to create campaigns that are personalized and targeted then you would be otherwise.

What is data quality?

When we talk about the quality of your data we usually evaluate two different sets: personal data that tells us about who the contact is such as last name, company, email address, and phone number, and business specific data that is unique to your business needs that helps to further identify the correct messaging, quality, and routing of the lead such as lead source, line of business, and product/solution of interest. 

A lot of this data will come from your CRM and form submissions but there are other inputs such as manual list loads, API integrations with third party systems (ie. CDPs, Event/Webinar, data enrichment, and social media). No matter the origination point, you’ll want to make sure that the data coming in is reliable, consistent, and follows your governance standards so that you can use that data to personalize, segment, and route as needed. Below we’ll lay out four ways to ensure the quality of your data enters and remains clean within your MAP. 

What is bad data?

There are different types of bad data and they each can impact your marketing in different ways. When we do an audit of a MAP, we will look out for: 

• Outdated data
  Old information like a former email address, former company, or previous contracts can misdirect your efforts in how you segment or pass along leads.  
• Duplicates
  Most MAP tools will use email address as the unique identifier, limiting duplicate records but this can happen when integrating with CRMs or other systems where new records are created with new email addresses instead of updating the original or when there isn’t a true unique ID used to tie multiple records together. This can lead to overgrowing your contact counts in your MAP and targeting the wrong (or bad) contact, increasing the likelihood of deliverability issues and lower engagement rates. 
• Non-standardized/non-conformed data
  Data can enter your MAP that does not match your standard values, for example if you require the two character country code and it comes in as the full name. This can have large implications on your ability to segment, use the data for filtering and campaign logic, and generate leads where CRM required fields have incorrect formatting. 

How to optimize your data

1. Begin with an audit
   Performing an audit of your current state within your MAP will direct you on where you need to go to ensure the quality of your data going forward. Pull reports on your required contact fields, CRM integration fields, and any form fields you regularly use. Then compare that data to the standardized values you feel should be present. This information will inform you on the fields that need to be cleansed, where picklists should be implemented, and where governance is needed to maintain clean data going forward, especially in imports from lists loads, CRMs, and 3rd party tools. Audits should be performed consistently over time (usually quarterly) to make sure that your data is being maintained and there are no new issues popping up.
    
2. Standardize your data
   Implementing a governance plan around your data is extremely important. As a marketing organization you should all be on the same page as to what the standard values should be for your contact fields that are used only for marketing (in your MAP) or across the organization in CRM, CDP, etc.
   Once you’ve determined what those values should be, using picklists wherever possible will make maintaining the data much easier. The picklists or their values can be used on your forms (either MAP hosted or on your website), in upload templates, and in data enrichment tools that will integrate with your MAP (not all tools have this option, so understanding the values they will be pushing will be important for your cleansing program – more to come on that).

   It’s important to note that the front and backend values of your picklists do not have to match. The front end is usually customer friendly – what they will see – and the back end is the value you need internally. This becomes important when your CRM does not use human readable values (Microsoft Dynamics generally uses GUID values). Making sure the backend matches with your other systems will help in passing successful leads and knowing what data to use for queries.

3. Contact Washing Machine programs
   To help with maintaining the standardized values in your MAP, building a cleansing program, or contact washing machine, is critical. Depending on your MAP, you can set up steps to update your contact data based on a set of criteria or rules as the contact enters your MAP. Many applications will have match/lookup rules, lookup tables that update based on a found value, and Regex options to make updates based on more sophisticated coding.
   Like I mentioned earlier, a cleansing program can come in handy to cleanse the data coming into your MAP from an enrichment tool that isn’t able to be customized with your standardized values. The cleansing program can be set to look for the known value coming from the enrichment platform and update with the corresponding standardized value that’s needed in your instance.

   One important thing to remember depending on your MAP is data priority. In many tools, like Oracle Eloqua, there is a priority set to where data comes from, usually placing the highest priority on CRM data. This can impact the ability to override existing data, so you’ll want to make sure that the appropriate priority is set to the cleansing program.

4. Customer Data Platform
   With all of the differing platforms marketers gather customer data from, which often do not communicate with each other, silos are created, with duplicate or inconsistent data as a byproduct. Customer Data Platforms, or CDPs, is software that is built to collect first-party customer data from any channel, system, or data environment into a master customer profile. The data that is collected is reformatted to support the internal systems you will be using the data in: MAP, CRM, content, social, and beyond.
   In this centralized data repository, users are able to create segments that can be exported into your integrated MAP, helping to have a true vision of the customer you are looking to target based on more than just profile data. Interested in learning more about CDPs? Check out our blog here.

I hope you found these tips useful and can use them as a guide for ensuring the quality of your data to create powerful and engaged campaigns. If you have questions on starting out on a data quality journey, reach out, we’d be happy to help!

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