Studies show that Customer Relations Management (CRM) databases decay at a rate of 22.5% per year. What does this mean? This means that as time goes by, some of the data in your CRM database becomes invalid due to the changes happening in the real world. For instance, if one of your contacts changes a job position or employer, your details about that contact become obsolete.

And remember, people keep changing their job positions, locations, employers, etc. This creates the need to constantly update your CRM database if you always want to have accurate data. Having accurate data will help improve the effectiveness of your marketing and sales campaigns. 

Updating your database manually is time-consuming and almost impossible, especially for those that have thousands of contacts. The most effective and reliable way to update your database is by using a data cleansing solution. Let’s now discuss what a data cleansing solution is and why you need to integrate one into your marketing roadmap. 

What is a data cleansing solution?

Data cleansing refers to the process of reviewing each contact’s data points, including job title, email address, location, phone number, company, etc. If any of the data points don’t match what is in the file of the data cleansing solution, you will save an alert about this disparity. 

In addition to alerting you of the inaccurate data points, data cleansing solutions also provide additional information that you may not have in your database about the various contacts. For example, if some of your contacts are missing job titles, a data cleansing solution can help you add them. Adding these unknown fields is referred to as data enrichment. 

How data cleansing tools work to keep your database with accurate data

You can either use these tools manually or automatically; I will share steps for both methods; 

Manual cleansing

• Export the segment or subset of your database that needs cleansing to an excel sheet
• Import the data in the excel sheet into your cleansing tool 
• When all data is imported, the cleansing tool will start updating all the data points with the correct information 
• Export the updated data back to the excel sheet
• Import the data from the excel sheet back to your CRM software.

The downsides of using the manual method are very clear; it takes more time and has to be done whenever your marketing team finds the need to do it. To overcome these downsides, we recommend using the automated option. 

Automated cleansing

• Integrate your CRM with the cleansing solution. Most of the modern CRM tools allow integration with cleansing solutions. So, before you pay for a cleansing solution, you need to make sure it integrates with your CRM software. 
• Customize the integration to your needs. After integrating your CRM and cleansing tool, you can now make changes that you find suitable. 
• Identify the CRM fields that you need the cleansing tool to update and also if there is a need to add or change specific fields. Cleansing tools have massive amounts of data, so ensure to take advantage of it.
• After making the above configurations, the cleansing tool will always make all the changes to the various CRM fields in real-time. 

Why you should integrate data cleansing in your marketing roadmap

1. It improves contacts conversion: One of the tasks that a data cleansing tool does is add more fields into your CRM. This increases the amount of information you have about your prospects, which makes it much easier to turn them into paying customers. 
2. Better and more accurate segmentation: You can easily create different market segments when you have enough data about the different contacts in your CRM. For example, you can create different segments based on age, job description, location, etc. You can later create various campaigns that target each of these market segments. Such campaigns usually lead to much better results than generalized ones. 
3. Ability to update data in real-time: cleansing tools update your CRM data in real-time when a change is detected. So, you will have the correct data about the various prospects at all times. 
4. Additional context for your outreach: The recent versions of cleansing solutions provide more qualitative details to sales teams to enable them to come up with the best strategy for approaching a specific segment of prospects. Some of this detailed information includes whether the prospect is using a competitor’s product. 
5. Improves customer experience: You will more likely offer your customers the best products/services when you have accurate information about them. With the right information, you can also create personalized support services and marketing campaigns that suit a specific market segment. This, in the end, leads to a better customer experience. 
6. More accurate data:  When you better target your customer with email marketing campaigns, your benchmarks (for opens, clicks, conversions) become far more accurate as you are targeting who is relevant to your campaign.   This leads to overall better performance across the board.  

Closing thoughts 

At this point, you know what a data cleansing solution is and why it is essential to integrate one into your marketing strategy. The next logical step is finding the cleansing tool that suits your business needs. There are quite a number of data cleansing solutions in the market today. The choice of which one to use should largely depend on factors like the size of your CRM database and whether the cleansing tool seamlessly integrates with your CRM software.