CRM data often requires maintenance and regular ‘cleaning-up’. Especially in case of small businesses, some people question whether such maintenance is trully necessary and effective. As you can imagine this is not a simple yes or no question. The answer is, it depends on what your objectives are. If you want to:
- Target contacts with the data (e.g. by job title or town in the simplest form)
- Keep your users on side and don’t create their own list of contacts
- Improve your response rates to your marketing emails
If none of those 3 objectives is your priority there isn ‘t much point spending any of your time and effort improving your data. But then, is there any point paying for a database either?
Data is often be hard work but fortunately there are many short cuts. An example could be marketing automation; plenty of systems can be setup to check the data quality for exceptions (stuff that doesn’t match what you say should go in a certain field – e.g. email field with no @, or Town field with numbers in it). If you haven’t heard of automation, there is no reason why you can’t do ‘semi-automatic’. All that involves is you setting up reports, saving them, and just re-running them at the start of each month. This is going to keep your data in shape. And then you can use your data to target. Or to help manage your relationships. After some time you will notice that the earlier investment in time really pays off.
Article ‘Is spending time on your CRM data worth your admin burden?‘ Written by Simon McNidder from Database First Aid
popcorn is a smart, easy-to-use and efficient platform that not only helps you compose beautiful emails and newsletters but also helps you manage your sales funnels and leads. If you would like to test popcorn and see if it could help improve your email marketing game, you can sign-up for the free trial here.
Enjoyed this article? Comment below or read through our blog for more sales and marketing insights
