What makes bad data difficult to identify is that it covers every aspect of your marketing strategy. From obsolete client mailing lists and outdated information on your website to inaccurate product presentations, these erroneous insights can lead to embarrassing or, worse, costly mistakes.
In truth, there are many ways in which bad data can hurt your marketing efforts. Here are some of the most common ones.
- You’re Unable to Customize Your Marketing Message
Here’s the thing: whether we’re talking about
Google advertising or email marketing, your campaign will only be effective if you send the right message to the right audience and at the right time. That can’t happen if your email lists are old and unchecked.
Data changes more frequently than you may imagine, so you need to update it regularly. In fact, according to recent studies,
40% of email users change their email address every two years, and 60% of people change job functions within their organization every year. If your data is outdated, any customization effort will be in vain. Frankly, you’re throwing money out the window by not checking your data regularly.
- Bad Data Erodes Your Customers’ Trust
Modern marketing is customer-centered, which means that keeping a happy and loyal clientele should be at the core of your strategy. Keep in mind that customers have a preferred channel for interacting with companies. Some prefer email marketing while others are more responsive to cold calling or
Google AdWords.
Knowing how to reach out to and engage with your prospects is paramount to the success of your marketing efforts. According to one survey,
45% of customers would ignore messages from a company that tries to communicate with them using a channel they expressly removed from the list.
Bad data can affect consumer loyalty. Communication efforts that are mistakenly titled or inadequately focused on offers that the prospects are not interested in show customers that your business is not interested in learning about them. So, they flag your message as spam.
Make sure that your data reflects your customers’ needs and preferences accurately.
- Undermining Your Lead Generation Efforts
More often than not, B2C communication is obsolete, and it doesn’t reflect the needs or interests of the target audience. Things are even more problematic when it comes to B2B.
Changes to job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and any purposely wrong information fed to your agents, or simple recording mistakes imply that business information can become outdated much sooner than individuals’ information. According to one study,
40% of B2B leads failed because of duplicate data, wrong or missing email addresses, and so on. This situation should not be acceptable, and bad data must be purged before you embark on a new marketing campaign.
Keeping your business contact list updated is essential if you want to adjust your client profiles, recognize what strategy may be most appropriate for them and feature the prospects who are most likely to convert.
- It Can Jeopardize Your Sales
Think about it this way: your sales reps rely on the data you provide to close deals. If you feed them bad data, then the entire process is doomed from the start. No matter how skilled a salesperson is, how good the product is, or how much time they spend on persuading potential customers. None of these efforts count if you haven’t spent enough time and resources to locate the key person to address at the right time and with the right message.
What’s even more dangerous is that bad data tends to perpetuate. If your initial call to a prospect was based on wrong information, the gap between what is and what should be might widen with follow-up calls, leading to more confusion and frustrations.
- Bad Data Costs You Money
Feel a shudder down your spine? You should, because low-quality information costs businesses
$3.1 trillion every year due to lost income, poor choices, wastefulness, legitimate resistance, greater server expenses, etc.
A lot of the time, businesses decide not to review their data to save money or staff resources. However, according to experts, it costs up to $100 per record to correct bad data. By the time you become aware of the inaccuracies, more than 20% of your customer data can be wrong, which will lead to increased costs to correct them.
Conclusion
Check, review and update your data regularly. Customer lists, business partners, competitors; they each should have tags and labels which can help you conduct a cleaner, more profitable business. Bad data can kill your campaigns and undermine your trustworthiness.
]]>
