How bad data is harming your company and how can you be on its good side?

  

Your sales team is super-excited for having a new, almost sure-shot lead off a database. You know that your product or service would sure make sense to them and it probably is a done deal, a matter of when and not if. Easy, peasy and breezy. Though it rains on your parade because the person you are trying to reach out doesn’t work with the company anymore. Nope, it isn’t Murphy’s law if it happens way too many times with you. It is bad data. Your database is rotten.

 

What is bad data?

 

 

Data is the core of every business process. Be it marketing, sales or customer care; data is crucial to maintain sanctity, productivity and functionality of each segment. In simple words, bad data is information that is incorrect, inconsistent and old. Any information that causes hurdle and block in a business pipeline at any step or is found to violate business standard is data you don’t want anything to do with.

 

The first step to eliminate the bad data out of your business is to accept that you can’t. Data isn’t a monolith, but it sure is massive.  Think of it as Bruce Almighty’s cabinet scene where yet another file is added to the drawer every second.

 

It is ever-evolving. Our WhatsApp chats, our Facebook feeds, Twitter timelines, Outlook e-mails- all of this is personal data. A business sits on tons of data that might or might not be useful. You can’t have an in-house team looking at it.

 

However, you can have the revelation that you need to adopt a proactive approach to keep tabs on incoming data. Bad data, like bad oil, can cause blockage in your business. Besides, not all data is the same. Your business is unique, and so are your customers. You can’t hope to reach out to a retail customer and keep your fingers crossed for a qualified lead.

 

Data that doesn’t conform to the standard pattern has a typo, input error or is duplicate. It can’t be used and should be rejected. But how do you decide this? Neil Patel makes it simple for everyone basis the Gartner study, which points out the parameters for data quality

 

√  Existence or availability of data: Does a business have a database?

√  Validity: Is the dataset valid? Is the information relevant to the business? Is it current?

√  Consistency: Is the database consistent for every process? Or is it stored in a similar syntax or value?

√  Integrity: Can the database and consisting information be called logical, relevant and accurate for a use case?

√  Accuracy: Is the dataset accurate?

√  Relevance: Does the database complement business objective?

 

The data that isn’t maintained, labelled or kept in line with business objective is terrible and it impacts every process of your business. However, it is marketing and sales department-the backbone of your business-that get affected a lot because the data isn’t up to the mark. Be it your lead generation campaign or landing page traffic-nothing remains sacred and gets tainted due to bad data. Forget market forecasting; you can’t even reach out to your existing customers owing to the lack of accurate data. Your Sender Reputation is damaged, ISPs can block your domain and your e-mails are directly dumped to the spam folder-and these are just the physical side-effects.

 

Data governance: In reports and real figures

 

So, you can tell now that bad data is bad. No ifs and buts about it. It isn’t even a veiled threat to your business, its reputation or existence. It is what it is. Bad data is like what you eat. You can’t have a sound system if you are eating junk. If you are putting garbage in the system, it has to garbage out. A business can’t expect to have a value-based offering if it is feeding on bad data.

The data that isn’t maintained, labelled or kept in line with business objective is terrible and it impacts every process of your business.

The cost of bad data

 

This report shows how the cost of bad data translates into a loss of business, wastage of time and money. Failing to validate data can cause a severe dent in a company’s revenues.

 

 

Poor data quality results in US$ 3.1 trillion loss every year for the U.S. companies. 

 

The onus of bad data on people

 

A Harvard Business Review suggests how grave and undermined data-driven practices are across various industry verticals. Only sixteen per cent of managers trust their data to base a business decision upon while vehemently agreeing that sparse data does increase costs, and do not let them make any decision. Hard-to-access data makes it difficult for brand managers to strategise and implement it. The existing customers remain unhappy, and the new customers a distant dream.

 

Another study suggests that serious errors plague more than fifty per cent of new data generated by business and only three per cent of the data is acceptable, where acceptable is a broad term used by the researchers.

 

Bad data as a productivity killer

 

Sales and marketing processes lose over 500 hours yearly due to bad data. The core business team spends its time on rectifying the data rather than chasing the right leads. If money is what you are after, it is $32,000 per sales rep down the drain.

 

If your business takes pride in being data-driven, here’s an eye-opening revelation for you—sixty per cent of data scientists almost half of their time cleaning and formatting the data. And fifty-seven per cent of them find it to be a time-killer activity and something that hampers their core job activities.

 

You see, lousy data dons many hats and all of them are super-villainous for your business practices.

 

How much data is bad data?

 

Marketing Sherpa has found out that about thirty per cent data reduces to the garbage every year, leading to ineffective marketing and sales processes.

 

Why does data go bad, though?

 

You are very careful with what you put into your system. Still, you can’t have control over sixty per cent of people who move on to new jobs, change their e-mail addresses, or phone number rendering the existing database without data hygiene practices unreliable. Almost twenty-five per cent of B2B database is right now inaccurate making poor data quality a considerable challenge. Out of this, email data validation and address search remain two common yet challenging task for decision-makers. In the age of digital marketing, e-mails remain the top-most choice to get in touch with customers, and due to the lack of a valid B2B valid e-mail list, your bond with customers go for a toss.

 

How do you recognise data decay?

 

Assuming that your business has a database for inference, several parameters make your data, a nasty, bad batch.

 

Outdated data: Old data can’t be counted in the present context, includes obsolete details is obsolete and serves no purpose for your business.

 

Incorrect data: If your B2B e-mail list contains incorrect e-mail addresses and has typos, good luck reaching out to your customers! These small discrepancies can put your lead generation campaign in a tough spot.

 

Non-standard data or inconsistent data: In an ideal business scenario, all departments would follow a set pattern, a similar format and way to enter the data. Alas, if wishes were horses. If a business doesn’t follow a standard format or protocol for data entries, it can lead to confusion and futile leads.

 

Repetitive data: Businesses often buy databases from different vendors that may or may not have similar details or incomplete entries, different formats and whatnot.

 

 

The forty-one per cent of inconsistent data is weak data that needs to be fixed. 

 

Incomplete data: There are several entry points for data. It could be a manual entry, or entries from different processes- resulting in several windows for error-making. For marketing, a customer’s business location is not an important detail. For a salesperson, seeking an F-2-F appointment, a site is a critical aspect.  The D&B report highlights that nearly eighty-seven per cent of businesses don’t have a record of revenue or turnover in their database, and seventy-seven per cent of them don’t cite industry type. Missing such critical data points can hamper the lead generation process.

 

Migrated data: Migrating data from one CMS to another, automating a process or moving from one vendor to another- can cause a glitch in the database and end up corrupting all of it.

 

Plenty of data: It is not to say that companies should shy away from big data. However, they should have a microscopic vision to find the fallacies and relevance of data that belongs to them. Finding if legacy data is appropriate and relevant to users, or should be parted ways with.

 

Why should you not make your decision based on bad data?

 

Remember, GiGo? If your business decisions are based on bad data, they aren’t going to be good ones. Strategic business decisions should be based on insightful and result-oriented data.

 

Also, businesses need to understand data quality from the perspective of big data. Having lots of data is useful, for, you can have as many data points to base your decision on. Now, imagine the level of failure and doom if all of it is rogue information. For a business, having good data is more valuable.

 

 

How is bad data damaging your business, and its reputation and B2B sales?

 

Bad data has a snowball effect on your business processes, and it always runs deep. Here’s how.

 

Are your e-mail bouncing rates higher? Is your e-mail marketing campaign experiencing more hard bounces and spam complaints? Or worse, your customers are not even bothering to check your mails and leaving them unread? As per this report by MediaPost, an average B2B e-mail list reduces by twenty-five to fifty per cent but if it doesn’t grow more than this rate, it signals towards bad data.

 

Also Read: 3 Common Reasons Your Emails Land in the Spam Folder

 

Not reaching out to its customers

 

Forgetting reaching out to the right customers, lack of data hygiene practices can cause an irreversible dent on your customer engagement process. Because hey, if you can’t even spell their name right or get their professional titles right, how can you be expected to do your homework and excel in professional commitments?

 

Besides, you can’t tell who’s who? Your database becomes corrupt to the extent that your right customers are somewhere out there, but you can’t reach out to them by any means. You can have as much data -and how do you want to keep it, is up to you to decide. Customers’ are a hard catch, and if you’re going to get hold of them, you need to be highly specific with your e-mail marketing campaign. 

 

Also Read: B2B Customer Retention Strategies – How To Retain Your Best B2B Clients

 

Since you aren’t reaching out to your customers, you can’t expect them to keep them happy, resolve their concerns or know their expectations causing loss of twenty-five per cent revenue every year! 

 

Companies that don’t pay attention to their database, or have inadequate data to drive their decisions, also run into the risk of bad reputation and leave them with a poor Sender score.

 

Productivity loss and inefficient process

 

Bad data is bound to have an impact on the sales and marketing processes. Your marketing team or salespeople would waste their time chasing information instead of chasing people with proper strategy, and e-mail marketing campaign. In the absence of data-based insights and accurate data, the campaigns and forecasting are based on assumptions and guesswork. Even if they “think” they are running data-based campaigns, the lack of data hygiene brings you to the juncture of bad data and incorrect information, leading to wrong decisions.

 

The loss in revenues and lack of appropriate responses can cause the morale of your sales team to falter. Your sales team won’t be able to make commissions and earn properly-leading to more stress to their already challenging jobs.

 

Increasing costs

 

The cost of quality 1-10-100 rule tells us that prevention is a better strategy, for, it can cost $100 to correct your course later on. The Harvard Business Review describes the snowballing effect of bad data and calls it the Hidden Data Factory.

 

So, what’s the solution to bad data?

 

Data is the fuel to your company’s growth. Hire data mining services for best data hygiene practices and enjoy better customer-oriented campaigns, exponential B2B sales, enhanced reputation, lead generation, and increased production rates. Here’s how data appending and email appending services can help you counter bad data, define a process to document, stream and push data across operations as well as harness its power to grow your business.

 

 

Data mining services help you streamline the incoming data and weed out the impurities of data. Not only this, but the best data appending company would also cross-verify, de-dupe and append the data. 

 

Conclusion

 

Bad data is bad. It is detrimental for your business, its reputation, lead generation and anything that you would like your business to be. Data mining services are your one-and-only option to stay in the market and ahead of the curve. A data mining company offers data appending services, data scraping services, skip tracing services, data scrubbing, data verification, web scraping services,  email verification, email address search, data verification services and phone appending services to bring you clean data and help you make data-driven decisions.  It is a cost-effective, reliable and industry-specific service that ensures your data remains streamlined, and business processes productive.

The tried-and-trusted ways to make a click-worthy and lead generating landing page

Do you need a landing page? Umm… yes.

The co-founder of Unbounce and digital marketing expert, Oli Gardner, agrees.    

But do you need lots of landing pages? Yes!

According to this research as well, the number of landing pages is directly proportionate to the increase in conversion rates. Companies that have 10-15 landing pages showed almost fifty-five per cent increase in lead generation and conversion compared to the ones that have ten or fewer.

Why?

Let’s figure out together!

What is a landing page?

Simply put, a landing page is where customers land on by clicking a paid ad. In the world of marketing, where a business’ marketing efforts and sales pipeline take off. It works separately from your website and is a preferred online e-mail marketing tool for two reasons

1. It is a teaser to your business. You tell your customers what you care about and how your services or products can make a difference in your life.
2. It doubles up as a lead generation tool. As Neil Patel suggests, assuming that the CTR is bang-on and the campaign reaches out to your targeted segment, the customers would be okay to further slide down the sales pipeline.

A landing page has one job. To convert. To get you leads through targeted ads on social media, or via e-mail marketing campaigns or PPC. Therefore, have a high chance of a conversion. Since it is a separate page, its reporting, feedback and analytics become much more manageable.

However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking landing pages as a cure-all for your lead generation challenges. Creating landing pages is challenging, and making landing pages that work, are functional and beautiful is a Herculean task. It isn’t an overnight solution to bring traffic and generate leads either. Only one out of fifty people who would land on your landing page would go for CTA, making the average conversion rate on landing pages across industry verticals is mere 2.5 per cent.

So, what is it?

All landing pages are pretty. But why don’t they convert? Landing pages receive traffic from paid ads.So, your actual work starts much before dolling up a landing page, okay, launching an ad campaign, then? No much before that!

Irrespective of how you are launching an ad campaign-via a PPC ad, an e-mail or social media, you need to get your CRM database right. All campaigns are kicked off using the data of CRM. If the database your business is sitting on is dirty, you can’t expect to kick off a successful ad campaign and of course, can only dream away for a landing page that converts. This survey suggests that poor data hygiene costs $614 billion to U.S. companies alone. Bad data translates into work-impacting scenario across the processes. It increases operational costs, results in unproductive work hours, dissatisfied customers and poor business processes.

Data hygiene is no longer optional. De-clutter your data for sound business decision.

Why should you hire a data mining service provider?

The data quality 1-10-100 rule tells you that wise humans have been saying all these years. Prevention is better than cure. It costs you $1 to prevent the onset of data decay, $10 to rectify the data and $100 to counter its failure.

For instance, without e-mail data validation, an e-mail campaign can cost your business three times more than a targeted campaign. Not to mention, the less than three per cent response rate!

 Why your CRM database is dirty?

Often companies get data from web scraping services, and as a result, the data could be inconsistent, copied and repetitive leading to poor data quality.

And also, because it is natural. People move to new cities; they change job titles and don’t give a damn about your database. Moreover, your salespeople could be in a hurry to fill the lead forms, or to complete their quota with typos or unfortunately, sometimes with false information.

Also Read: Now Save Time and Money with This New Way- Skip tracing for Banking and Finance!

So. if you want to run a successful ad campaign and make a landing page that works and brings you sales leads, fix your data hygiene first with data mining services. Let them find the hotspots for errors and rectify them. An integral part of data mining is data scrubbing and e-mail appending services.

Data scrubbing consist of cleaning the data of inconsistencies, syntax, validation and other inaccuracies. Enhancing the data with rich and relevant information of a targeted user base is called data appending or to be precise, e-mail appending or email verification for an e-mail marketing campaign.

Often when a salesperson would fill information manually, they would leave the demographics or buying preferences. They wouldn’t write a user’s age, demographics or buying choice. A data verification service provider not only does this for you but also gives it a structure and consistent pattern. So, next time when you are doing an address search from a database, you know that you would find it.

So, if you want people to land on your landing page, and not turn it into a no man’s land, you know what to do now!

Alright. But why do I need as many?

A business needs a different landing page at each step of a sales pipeline. People coming from a social media contest require a landing page with a suitable CTA. Similarly, so would incoming traffic from a blog, a webinar registration, an e-book download, a guest post or a YouTube channel. It helps you to track the traffic, figure out what works and what doesn’t while giving you as many avenues to open new possibilities. A landing page puts the spotlight on you by targeting the right set of customers.

Elements of a successful landing page

The first impression is the last. But nobody has told you that these first impressions take the only 1/20th of a second. The best part is you can have as many landing pages as you want. The bad news is there is no written rule or ten commandments set in stone as to what works.

It is mostly the collective knowledge that everybody works with and a simple rule that states eighty per cent of people remember visuals. But your aim should be to create a well-designed and balanced landing page that is visually delightful and pleasing. No noise and clutter, please!

The Conversion Rate Experts suggest that some changes in landing pages and banking on trust elements led to a jump in revenue for Moz. Would you not want to sail in the same boat?

If your answer is ‘Yes’, scroll down for lowdown on how to make a great landing page that brings revenue and relevant traffic to your website!

A landing page is meant for conversion. It is designed to do one work, which is to get clicks and convert. Here are some of the critical elements that make a landing page, exceptional and functional.

Copy: A great headline and a succinct copy with a simple CTA are the non-negotiable attributes that hold the key to success. A catchy headline will prevent bounce rate and prompt the users to read more. The to-the-point copy will tell the customers what is in it for them. Similarly, you wouldn’t like your customers to keep guessing what they are supposed to do once they land on your page. So. a well-thought-out CTA is a must.

What should your content look like? Types of content on a landing page:

• Local content: Relevancy is the keyword here. If you can add local elements such as regional language, a local icon can take you a long way in search engine indexing and conversion.
• Social content: It is advisable to have different landing pages for social media. Your audience on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is diverse and should be targeted separately to increase engagement rates.
• Smart content: Apart from persuasive content, animation, GIFs, memes, and customised content is the way to go! However, it is recommended that you use them in a balanced manner and do not go overboard with any of it.

Your content should answer:

Why: The customers should know why they are at your landing page.

What: What’s your USP?

How: How your product can help them?

Trust emblem: The trust indicators for your business is a logo, customer testimonials and aggregators’ stamp of approvals. If a customer reads a positive review about a service or product, they are more likely to respond and convert into a potential lead. Ensure an optimised flow for your customers.

Keep it simple, silly: Landing pages are a dedicated way to tap into a prospective set of customers. Therefore, directing them to your website isn’t a smart idea. While a single CTA button can increase your conversion rate by sixty per cent, it is wise to keep the form and CTA easy to understand.

Form a connect: Think of a landing page as an experience that you are bringing forth to your customers. So, there shouldn’t be a disconnect at all from a PPC ad, social media ad campaign or e-mail they are coming from. They shouldn’t be taken away with surprise and have to cross-check if they are a secure connection or right page.

Make it pop: Your CTA button should stand out in the grand scheme of things. While it should ‘gel’ with the rest of the page, a customer should know the outcome. It has been observed that a ‘Free subscription to 10-day trial’ work any day better than a ‘sign-up.’

Steer clear of third-party navigation links: Having an external link on a landing page can make customers leave the landing page and move on to the said link. So, even if your landing page is offering a download or registration, it should happen there, without letting the customers leave.

Have a privacy statement: Tell your customers that you won’t sell their data anywhere. Yes, it is crucial. However, be it your website link, social media profiles or anything that can “distract” them from a landing page, should be kept in the footer space, which should also be the minimum. Often a landing page has so much going for it, and you wouldn’t have much space left for it anyway!

The lead generation form: Aha, finally! The only thing that you are going through the trouble of it. Ponder over your target customers and their information. What exactly do you want from them? Often, B2C businesses find that the customers aren’t comfortable giving away their data but the question is, will they check their e-mails even? B2B sales leads, however, thrive on direct contacts. So, figure out your target audience, opt for data scrubbing services, derive action-oriented insights and go for it!

Formulate the exit stage: There are two outcomes to a customers’ arrival at a landing page:

1. Assuming that the CTA is apt and a landing page is excellent, a customer would leave the desired details with you
2. The customers would like to get off as soon as they land.

In each scenario, you should have an exit strategy ready for them. If a customer leaves without leaving details, think of incentivising the exit. Then, you can think of redirecting them to your website, social media sites or blog where you can hold them off for a little bit longer.

Similarly, hoping that your customers expect the way you want them to, go for a simple Thank-You message with the relevant details in the e-mail and maybe an offer or promo code.

More than sixty-five per cent of B2B businesses believe in the lead generation capabilities of landing pages. Unfortunately, for most of them, it is either poorly designed or take the customers to the home page.

Don’t make these mistakes and make your landing page great. Start from scratch and get down to the basics, first! Optimise your ad campaign and landing page experience with the power of data! Get your CRM database cleaned. Hire a skip tracing services provider and ensure that your ad campaign is reaching out to the customers that are the right fit for you.