A simple, 3-part framework for keeping your marketing database healthy.
Measurement
Knowing the number of dupes in your system doesn’t count as measuring health. It’s only part of it. Build both snapshot and time series reports of your database size, marketable records, unusable data, and engaged contacts – bonus points for slicing the reports by industry, geography, and other meaningful dimensions.
Increase good data
Garbage in = garbage out. You increase good data by configuring data sources (which could be excel imports), conducting data enrichment, and building data normalization. Good data is accurate, and usable by the business.
Removal of bad data
Cutting out bad data brings speed to your campaigns and system processes, and elevates your personalization efforts. You remove bad data through deduplication, deleting/updating stale data, and purging junk data such as invalid contact info and fraudulent records.
This is also good start to the order of things. By measuring first, you know where you are and if you are making progress. By fixing incoming data (increase good data) you plug the hole in your sinking ship. And when you begin to remove bad data, you can then see tangible improvements to your marketing.