Tag Archives: data hygiene

Why (Marketo Database) Hygiene Matters

Let’s talk about hygiene. We all know there are some things we do have to do in the background to keep up with our own. When you neglect your hygiene, it might not always be immediately apparent, but inevitably, something unpleasant will make itself known. This is true for your personal habits, and it’s true for your Marketo database.

What are the consequences of poor database hygiene? There are a few common ones discussed below. None of them are positive. Any marketing automation strategy developed on top of a poorly maintained set of records is going to be flawed in its execution over time. 

Deliverability. Poor deliverability is probably the most consequential over the long term. Keeping a clean database reduces the chances of sending email out that reduces your deliverability credibility. If your credibility is poor, you are more likely to be classified as spam. Being spam is obviously going to reduce your effectiveness as an email marketing machine. Recovering credibility after sustained losses is not typically an easy undertaking. 

Cost. On a financial note, poor database hygiene increases the difficulty of managing record bloat. Marketo Engage licenses include size limits for each instance’s record database. When those limits are reached, Adobe will alert the account owner that they need to reduce their database’s size or license a larger database. At bare minimum, good database maintenance will allow for timely identification of records that can be purged, keeping costs down. More aggressive database hygiene will automate at least some of the record removal process slowing down the database’s growth rate in real time.

Data.  Lastly, on a more personally strategic level, poor hygiene leads to flawed data. Clean databases keep their records up to date. Marketing teams spend a lot of time making important decisions about who to target for their campaigns. The realization that the audience or trend is not, in fact, what everyone thought it was because of flawed data leads to frustration. Frustration leads to finger pointing, and no one enjoys finger pointing.

Leadous has plenty of experience helping clients implement and expand their database hygiene plans. Typically, the first thing we see and recommend is clients setting up different campaigns to handle various kinds of potentially problematic records. For instance, the response to a record that received one soft bounce response is going to be different from a record that received an email is invalid response. Our consults help our clients identify the various categories. Once the categories are defined, we can also advise what to do in each case. Then we can build out smart campaigns to comb through all of the records and take those actions. 

Once the problematic categories start being identified, some of the responses taken in response to those records will help address record bloat. How aggressively they choose to do so is another strategy the Leadous team can help guide. In any case, once the time for an active purge arrives, previous database maintenance will have identified the categories that are likely targets for elimination. From there, it would be a relatively simple task to actually remove the records.

Keeping records accurate is also part of the maintenance required for a healthy database. An important part of that is data normalization campaigns. In a pretty traditional example, country names typically need to be normalized into an expected value. Automation enforcing standardized names prevents future ambiguity. Why include “USA, US, United States, United States of America” in all future filters? Instead, one campaign can look for all the potential variants and change them to a singular, preferred standard. Some data fields that typically benefit from a data normalization campaign include state, professional title, and professional role among others. 

These ideas represent just the beginning of database hygiene. All of the advanced phases of Leadous’ Marketing Automation Progression Model depend on the foundation created by trustworthy data. The effort required for this foundational work pays off in the short term, but it also yields additional dividends down the line. Team Leadous loves helping our clients address their data challenges and ensure they have a funnel that is quality from the bottom up. 

Questions about your data? Talk with an expert today

Get quality data in your marketing database with 5 data hygiene best practices

Driving results from your marketing automation strategy is always going to circle back to one key area: data. That’s right. Data is the key to your success as a marketer. 

From preparing data for customer onboarding and implementation, to launching new demand gen programs, or simply keeping data storage costs down, clean data is central to it all. Ensuring you have clean data ready to go for your next big marketing initiative comes down to your data hygiene processes and workflows.

Data hygiene processes usually look for the following data records to either update, merge or delete:

  • Bad Emails
  • Duplicate Records
  • Incomplete Records
  • Unsubscribes
  • Unstandardized Contact Information
  • Suppression Lists
  • Hard/Soft Bounces

By implementing best practices and workflow data management rules centered on data hygiene, you can root out where the above data may be causing issues, and ensure you are setup for success. Ultimately, you’ll also be able to deliver improved lead tracking, personalization, and engagement from a clean database.

So you’re on board with revamping your data hygiene processes, but where do you begin? Here are 5 best practices to keep in mind as you embark on your data cleaning journey (and remember, you can always call on a partner like Leadous to help).

Think beyond the admin

How are you or your team using your database now, and how do you plan to use it in the future? 

If you don’t know what your internal stakeholders (including marketing, sales, customer success, c-suite leadership and of course, database admins) are looking for in the data, it makes it harder to keep a well-ordered database that works for everyone. It also probably means you’re saving a lot of superfluous data that’s costing you money to store.

Take a look at the data your teams need, and make sure it matches up with the data and fields you’re currently collecting. 

Consider each of your internal stakeholder’s needs for the CRM (what are they trying to accomplish with the data or analyze within the data) and list out the information you’ll need in order to achieve those goals. 

Setting up the data with your end goals in mind ensures you’re using the right fields, collecting the right data, and getting the most out of your system.

Data standardization is your friend

Once you’ve got a firm understanding of who is using the data and why, start applying some common standardization across it all. 

Use the same field labels and define terms for team members that may not know them. Stay consistent, and encourage anyone using the database to do the same – in fact document your standards and share them. And then share them again in a quarter and the quarter after that!

Simple workflows to add include verifying email addresses, standardizing mailing addresses, abbreviations, and numbers. 

Make sure it’s all in one place

If you already have your CRM and marketing automation platform working and talking together, kudos! (If not, let’s talk, we can help.) But are there duplicate contact records across systems? Do you have automated workflows to flag and merge those records? 

Map out the journey of your data and start documenting and standardizing the workflows that need to happen to keep that data clean across systems. Make sure your organization is in agreement with where the single source of truth is for all your data, and stick to it.

Roll up your sleeves

Your business goals and the extent of your existing data hygiene processes will dictate how extensive your database cleanup needs to go. Do you need a database overhaul? Or  just to update a few contact record fields? It helps to go back to the goals of your database and start there. 

Are you trying to find loyal clients to run upsell campaigns? Re-engage stale leads? Start organizing data according to the goal you’re looking for, all the while building programs to clean out duplicates and inactive contacts (or putting them into a re-engagement campaign).

This process can be tedious at times, but there are many experts out there who can take on that burden to quickly and efficiently clean up your data. Check out our data hygiene services and contact us if you’d like more information.

Mark your calendar

The purpose of a good data hygiene strategy is getting processes and automated workflows in place that mean you won’t have to do it all the time. Once you have these processes in place, try to still schedule regular data check-ins to make sure all is running smoothly and nothing needs to be adjusted. Even a weekly 10 minute check on your various data hygiene cleanup workflows is usually sufficient to stay on top of any new data issues. 

Looking for more information? Leadous experts are ready to help, with best practice driven strategies to get your data clean.  Contact us now.