An optimized database is the key to high-performance business actions. An estimated 30% of data become obsolete every year: Changes in email address, postal address, telephone number, etc. Your file is deteriorating. Your salespeople waste time verifying and updating information. This impacts your sales. How can you maintain the quality of your data? Through improvement planning, database analysis, database normalization, database cleaning, and data collection preparation.
Defining a data enrichment plan
Data enrichment planning is the first step to prevent time and revenue loss due to a poor-quality database.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What are your purposes for improving your database?
- What information should you add?
- How often do you need to enrich your file?
- How are you going to do this?
- Who will be in charge of this?
Answering these questions will help you determine the ideal pace for your company, and you avoid accumulating unnecessary data. Depending on your needs, it may be useful to hire a person who will be in charge of improving your database. This will allow your sales force to focus on prospection and sales.
Analyzing existing data
Analyzing your data enables you to assess not only their quality but also their suitability for your company. Do not rush into cleaning and enriching your database.
First, examine your file as it is now. Analyze the following elements:
- the types of data you own
- their relevance to the development of your actions
- their recentness
- their reliability
- their source
If your data are more than one year old, there is a good chance that part of them is obsolete. Is information entered manually? Human errors are more frequent that you think.
Poor quality data generate costs for your company. Think of the time salespeople spend searching for or verifying information instead of canvassing. If you improve your database, you allow them to focus on prospection and sales.
Database standardization and database sanitizing
Following this analysis, it is time for database standardization and database cleaning. During your analysis, you may have discovered duplicates, wrongly encoded information, incomplete or useless entries, etc.
Perform a thorough cleanup:
- Delete superfluous data, considering your long-term goals
- correct false or obsolete information
- identify and delete duplicates
- normalize data, when applicable (address, telephone number, dates, etc.)
Sanitizing your database will improve your efficiency. Your sales force has all the information they need to contact existing and potential customers. For your employees, this means less wasted time, and for your company it means more sales, hence a better turnover.
Organizing data collection
Are your data validated, standardized, and updated? That is great, but to increase sales, don’t just use your current contact base. Expand it by collecting new customer data and enriching existing entries if necessary. When analyzing your file, you may have noticed that crucial data was missing.
Implement actions to collect information on your leads and customers, using:
- contact forms
- resource download
- newsletter registration
- contests
- loyalty programs
- etc.
To maintain the quality of your data, it is important that you analyze, standardize, and clean your database periodically. Determine a frequency depending on your needs, your resources, and your goals. Continuously enrich your file by completing current data and obtaining new information.
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