If your company aims to optimize its workflow, increase profits, and boost customer retention, data quality is crucial. However, having clean customer data is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today. Why? Just look at the current statistics:

• 25% of the average B2B database is incorrect;

• 62% of companies rely on marketing and prospect data that’s up to 40% inaccurate;

• 64% of highly successful data-driven marketers say improving customer data quality is the most challenging obstacle to achieving success. 

Cleaning up your customer data is practically like cleaning up piles of dust from your customer files or business books. Dirty data can involve everything from outdated contact names to phone numbers, addresses, and more.

According to a 1-10-100 rule developed by George Labovitz and Yu Sang Chang, it can cost you $1 to verify the data entry, $10 to fix it later, and $100 if you do nothing. But, if your company has clean customer data, then falling into such situations can be avoided. 

Clean Customer Data Equals Excellent Customer Retention

It’s not a secret that creating a new customer costs more than retaining a current customer, five times more, to be precise! So, to make customer retention your top priority, you have to first prioritize clean data. The quality of your marketing database directly influences customer retention in more ways than one: 

Clean Customer Data Identifies Your Most Valuable Customers

Data points such as purchase history and frequency can help you identify your most loyal customers. From there, you can easily target this segment of customers with specific retention strategies. 

Clean Customer Data Helps You Predict Customer Behavior

With clean data, you can leverage your marketing database to uncover purchasing trends and use those trends to recognize certain trigger events that lead customers to make purchases, end their business with your company, and so much more. 

Clean Customer Data Helps You Personalize Your Messaging

Clean and comprehensive customer data can provide insights into customer’s needs, the new products or services they might be interested in, and their preferred communication channels and tactics. 

Clean Customer Data Affects Your Reputation

For those companies serious about having a positive reputation with customers, it’s clean customer data that helps provide this through better communication. Incorrect or incomplete data can only result in unopened or bounced emails. Such data lead marketers to contact customers that are not in their target segment, flooding their emails with what they can see as spam or repetitive communication. This can portray your company as careless and can seriously affect your reputation. 

Takeaway

If cleaning your customer data is not on your list, it likely should be. Not only will this eliminate any issues you may face throughout the year, but it will also save you time and money, as well boost your customer retention and grow your revenue. Customer retention is achieved by providing customers with products, services, and information they want, like, or need. However, without a clean and effective marketing database, the above tactics won’t be effective. You will fail to properly categorize your most loyal customers, and all of the predictions you make about their future behavior will be distorted by inaccurate data.