What exactly is data hygiene and why is it important to creators
In business, data reigns supreme.
With such high stakes dependent upon data, it's clear the reason why good, clean data is crucial for a business's success. Inaccurate data - known as dirty data - could lead to a failure in business efforts.
There's hope! for data hygiene data hygiene.
In this piece in this post, we'll discuss data storage, what data hygiene is and why it's important. Also, we'll discuss data hygiene best methods to make sure you're keeping your data in good order and your business booming.
What types of databases can store data?
- Contact information
- Demographics information
- Email marketing engagement
- Past purchases of your products or products or
- Relevant information on their needs to your services and products
Larger companies may use a more comprehensive data base for business intelligence and analytics to access even more data points about their business. For example, a clothing store could record its products' sales according to SKUs and an airline could have details on their flights or a software as a service firm would collect data about how their customers use various features of their software. In some cases, the data becomes granular, and there are whole teams at large companies that maintain databases and analyze the information.
Data hygiene is equally important for both scenarios. However, since we're focused on creators in this blog and not on the CRM, we'll concentrate on data collected through the CRM.
What exactly is data hygiene?
Data hygiene Data hygiene is an ongoing and continuous process that ensures the integrity of data. This means you're maintaining data to ensure that it's correct constant, reliable and consistent. Clean data can prevent companies similar to yours from struggling with issues created by dirtier data.
What exactly is dirt data? It is considered dirty data if it shows one or more of the following features:
- Duplicate information
- Incomplete (think missing contact fields)
- Invalide
- Incorrectly input
- Misspellings, typos, and spelling variants that are multiple
The most important thing to remember is that dirty data is incorrect.
The most frightening aspect of filthy information is that it's way too easy to introduce mistakes into your data. When you input data improperly or don't regularly update it, or make an accidental alteration while updating your system, errors could be introduced at any point in your process.
What is the reason data hygiene is important?
Let's look at how data that is dirty could affect your company. These are just a few of the reasons why keeping accurate data is essential.
- Then you'll be wasting money and time.
Dirty data will cost you. In the U.S. alone, businesses are losing around $3.1 trillion each year due to inadequate management of data.
The issue isn't just that money gets lost, but time too. The LeadJen study revealed that sales personnel wasted average 27% of the potential sales time using incomplete facts. The wrong phone number or calling the wrong person is not enjoyable for any person.
As we are aware, time is money - so ultimately following wrong data is the most sure way to lose out on revenues.
- Emails and other marketing campaigns won't have the proper tailoring.
In the event that your data isn't current and current or inaccurate it could be sending prospects emails or posts that don't correspond with their current position in the buyer journey.
The kind of mistakes that are made could tarnish both your customer relationship and brand reputation. The result is an absolute double-whammy.
The worst part is that mistakes like these may result in an increased frequency of emails being re-subscribed to. Spam reports, unsubscribes and hard bounces are possible if you don't tailor your content according to the needs of your target audience. All too quickly you'll start to see your email list shrinking.
- It's not possible to gain complete insight into the sale funnel.
In the absence of regularly reviewing and maintaining your database, you'll be unable to gain insight into the quality of the sales funnel. This is why it's impossible to respond to questions such as:
- How many qualified leads are there?
- Which leads do you want to eliminate from your funnel?
- What is your churn rate?
Knowing the accurate answer to questions like these will help you determine where you need to focus your sales and marketing efforts. You might even make OKRs (objectives as well as key outcomes) from your own data!
Dirty data defense: data hygiene best practices
As you can see, the downsides of dirty information can be absolutely devastating to the business. But, never fear the best practices for data hygiene can be found here. If your business is year old or a day-old, these data hygiene practices can be implemented anytime in the life of your enterprise. Let's get to it!
- Begin by conducting the audit.
Audits can give you an understanding of your data's overall image. It helps you ascertain what metrics are useful and not beneficial and which data is more harmful than is helpful. With an audit that you can address questions such as "Which metrics are required in order to make a decision?" and "Which sectors are most in require of improvement?".
In essence, an audit will identify the areas where there are issues in the data collection process and also standardization.
- Review and enhance data collection methods.
After the audit, or during it is a great moment to examine at all the sources and methods that data is entered into your systems.
Another consideration is how to minimize manual data entry. Automation tools not only reduce data-entry human errors but also free up time for more important tasks - like making your next famous TikTok (kidding or do we? ).
- Pay attention to tiny particulars.
While in life it is our goal to not be concerned about small details - this doesn't ring true with data. Small errors in data can rapidly lead to major issues - like creating a marketing strategy based on flawed information. Yikes!
When collecting data, make sure that you are doing the followingthings:
- Standardizing mailing addresses
- Verifying email addresses
- Standardizing common abbreviations and numbers
By noticing the small little details, you'll be able to spot larger, more impactful mistakes. If you spot a couple of these, you might realize that it's time to adopt uniform operating practices or rules for collecting and inputting data.
- Establish a continuous cleanse of data.
We're sorry to disappoint you that your data hygiene journey isn't over following the initial clean-up. It's an ongoing procedure that requires commitment and perseverance. Keep in mind that dirty information can be easily introduced into your systems , so it is important to keep an eye on it like a hawk.
A great way to ensure that clean data from being a problem is to implement regular maintenance and standardization processes. We have a list of processes that we would recommend:
- Data entry standardization. Every data point on your system needs to be manually entered in a uniform method (especially when manually entered).
- The handling of data errors. Create guidelines (even when they're not intended to yourself) that clearly outline how errors will be managed. For example, how will correct duplicate or incorrect entries?
- The goal is to avoid dirty data in initial place. In practice, this may include adding important fields to your forms to collect data and eliminating non-essential fields. Additionally, you may perform a data audit regularly to ensure dirty data isn't getting back into your company with an out-of-date lead generation template, as an example.
The most important aspect of data hygiene
Solely having data isn't enough to expand your business, or direct sales and marketing efforts.
To avoid losing revenue as well as time and clients, and even jeopardizing your brand's reputation, your data needs to be complete and error-free. Making sure your data is maintained with good proper hygiene procedures ensures that you've got useful insights that your company can utilize with confidence!
At , we believe on the value of data and not just for large multi-person corporations, but for our favorite kind of company - the ones operated by one-person, enthusiastic entrepreneurs. We're talking to you!