Conventional marketing and sales wisdom dictate that if your tactics are not bringing results, you need to double down your efforts. However, that is not always the case, especially when there are signs of dirty data. For example:
- Are your sales reps spending more time verifying contact phone numbers?
- Are your mail orders getting undelivered all the time?
- Do you notice duplicate contacts and missing information in your databases?
A resounding yes to any of the above might indicate a problem with the quality of your contact lists. In this case, a list matching software with robust data cleansing and deduplication features can help clean dirty data and enhance the performance of your campaigns. Let’s look at how this can occur in more detail.
5 Ways Bad Data Undermines Sales and Marketing Efforts
Research from Gartner reveals that bad data can cost organizations around $15 million every year. However, the warning signs are far more sinister and hidden. Here are a few. A list matching software comes in extremely handy in all these situations.
- More time spent verifying contacts: if contact lists are not updated or accurate, it can lead sales reps to spend substantial hours verifying phone and address information. A source reveals that more than 40% of people’s phone numbers and 20% of postal addresses change every year. If not addressed, this can increase the sales life cycle time and hinder sales’ ability to close more deals.
- Higher email bounces and unsubscribe rates: invalid emails and incorrect contact lists can lead to high bounces and unsubscribe rates. This, in turn, can lead to your email domain getting blocked by email providers, and this could affect your brand reputation and create negative word of mouth.
- Poor lead scoring: effective lead scoring helps marketers and sales teams to approach leads and prospects at the right time and with the right messaging. However, poor data quality can prevent marketing qualified leads from becoming marked as sales ready and prevent sales representatives from reaching out in time to win new business.
- Lack of personalization: sophisticated customer tracking that allows companies to target prospects with personalized messages based on user activity such as cart abandonment, webinar signups, etc. can also get muddled in the case of duplicate records and entities.
- Missed upsell/cross-sell opportunities: outdated and missing data due to changing existing customer preferences and wants can fail to signal account managers on seizing cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.
What is a List Matching Software?
Company A is a B2B sales company that runs outbound campaigns in three separate cities, each with its own SQL-powered database and list of Excel lists for contacts. However, owing to poor email and cold calling campaign response, it notices that across all three of its cities, there are multiple instances of:
- Duplicate contacts
- Missing and invalid emails
- Phone numbers with varied patterns
A list matching software, also known as data deduplication or data matching software, allows users to identify and remove data errors, including duplicate errors, from databases and lists.
List matching Softwares can inspect and remove errors across millions of records in a fraction of the time compared to that done by manual, scripting methods. Here are some of the ways it can enhance marketing and sales campaigns:
- Improve email responsiveness: removing invalid, incomplete, uncorrupted emails mean more emails can be sent in campaigns and fewer bounce rates.
- Enhance mail delivery rates: an accurate address list, along with geocoding information can substantially improve mail deliveries and save mailing and churning costs.
- Better targeting and positioning: having up-to-date data from a list matching software can enable better targeting of prospects and leads, and give marketers insights to utilize personalized messaging and positioning.
- Minimize turnaround time: relevant and timely data can reduce the time taken for sales and marketers to verify information or remove errors, which can shorten the lead and turnaround time.
How Do List Matching Tools Benefit Organizations?
It isn’t uncommon for companies to opt for manual or in-house methods to cleanse data-quality errors and remove duplicate entries. However, manual methods tend to work better for a few thousand records. For millions and billions of records, however, more complex matching rules and scripts must be used to efficiently and accurately clean errors at scale in minimal time.
A list matching tool has the following capabilities and features to achieve these outcomes:
- Data import: native connectivity to relational databases, Excel and TXT files, CRMs, APIs, and more allows users to run data-quality projects on multiple, non-homogenous data sources.
- Data profiling: an in-depth audit or health check of your data sources helps you identify the statistics of missing values and records with casing, punctuation, and other anomalies.
- Address standardization and verification: sophisticated address standardization and verification help you identify the accuracy of addresses for mail campaigns and geocode location details to determine latitude, longitude, and ZIP+4 values.
- Data cleansing and standardization: dedicated transformations and parsing features allow you to fix errors in line and normalize varied formats of name, address, and phone fields particularly in line with data quality requirements.
- Data deduplication and enrichment: fuzzy matching, phonetic, exact matching rules help you identify variations in order to find duplicate entries, and then have the option to merge and enrich them for survivorship.
Real-time or batch processing: automate list matching operations in time-based or recurring batch modes, or configure API-based workflows to match and dedupe records in real-time.
