As data-driven marketing takes center stage, inaccurate, invalid or irregular data has an increasingly large negative impact on revenue. Dirty data dramatically reduces any organization’s ability to connect with leads, remain relevant in the marketplace, and effectively realize a return on marketing investments. Dirty data refers to all prospect and customer information that is outdated, duplicated, incorrect, or incomplete.
Overall, poor data hygiene costs businesses about 12 percent of their revenue, according to data from Experian’s data quality research and Global Data Quality Research. Other findings:
- 2 times as many businesses with data quality technology in place have also seen a significant increase in their profit than those without.
- 78 percent of businesses experience difficulty with complete email delivery
- 81 percent of loyalty programs are incompletely optimized due to dirty data
- 63 percent of companies lack a holistic solution to data quality
Dirty data directly affects lead generation and marketing efforts, but it also devalues customer relationships and lowers your ability to accurately track results. When working with dirty data, companies are unable to make accurate forecasts or develop marketing strategies that align with their intended audiences.
Every piece of email or direct mail that goes to an invalid address is a message that didn’t reach a lead, but it also cost money and effort to produce. In effect, then, dirty data costs you twice. Not only are you spending time and effort on invalid data, but you’re also incurring a hefty cost for attempting to reach someone that is unreachable based on the inaccurate data in your base. Not to mention the opportunity cost with leads you can no longer communicate with, customers who lose touch, and markets that remain untapped.
While financial costs are the most readily measurable consequence of poor data hygiene, they are not the only way dirty data can be costly. Rolling out a major marketing campaign based on invalid or irrelevant customer data, can damage an organization’s reputation. Dirty data can decrease email service providers’ trust in a company as well as reducing individual prospects’ faith in the organization to provide relevant, timely messages.
Rebuilding an organization’s reputation is a far greater challenge than maintaining it, so data hygiene must remain a priority.
Reach Marketing offers the industry’s leading data hygiene and data processing service, ReachVerify.
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