Data cleaning is a form of data management that ensures information stays orderly and relevant. Over time, businesses accumulate a lot of information, which eventually becomes outdated. Cleaning data is the process of going through everything within a database and removing or updating information which is incorrect, incomplete, duplicated or irrelevant.
Why is cleaning data important?
Businesses tend to hold a lot of important information on both employees, clients and customers, and they have a duty to ensure that it is kept safe and organised. Having accurate customer information helps you get to know your audience better and enables you to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Having clean data improves its quality, which is better for your business. It means you don’t have to grapple with outdated documents or annoy people who don’t want to be contacted, and allows employees to work efficiently. The following data cleaning steps will help you get rid of errors and protect your company’s reputation.
Create a data quality plan
Creating a data quality plan enables you to set expectations for your data. It enables you to track the health of your data and maintain good data hygiene on an ongoing basis. A comprehensive plan will help you spot dirty data in the first place and then develop a strategy to solve the issues. If you have had ongoing problems with your data it will enable you to understand the root cause of your data health problem. Which leads us to…
Check the data at the point of entry
The easiest way to maintain a clean database is to make sure the data is correct at the point of entry. Ensure that all the data is standardised so that data fields and formats are complete and consistent. Create a standard operating procedure to ensure that only quality data enters your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. If all data is inputted correctly, you will significantly reduce problems further down the line. A well-organised CRM can make a huge difference to the success of your business.
Make sure your data is accurate
Accurate data is invaluable to your company as marketing is only effective if it is able to reach the right people. It only takes one digit in a phone number or one letter in an email address to invalidate that data and make it useless to you. Checking the accuracy of your data is usually done by third-party data cleaning services, and it’s well worth paying a premium for the experts to cross-check your data for you.
Check for duplicates
Duplicate data costs money in terms of campaign spending and general maintenance. They also guarantee a bad experience for the customer, which can quickly lead to your brand being damaged. There are lots of tools available that can check for database for duplicate entries, which frees up your time to spend on other matters.
Append data
A data append is the process of adding new data to an existing database, usually from external sources. This process enables you to gather missing contact information from your customers and learn more about your audience for projects such as precise targeting. A data append service matches your database with an external one, from which attributes of your customers are pulled and appended to your records, creating a more complete picture.
Once all of these steps are complete you will have a beautifully clean database which will work much more successfully for you and your business.
