Why is accurate CRM data critical for your marketing strategy?

In my organization, precise CRM data has significantly improved decision-making processes. It has allowed us to move from a reactive to a proactive stance in our marketing efforts. By leveraging precise CRM data, businesses can segment their audience more accurately, predict customer behavior, and optimize the customer journey across various touch-points.We can anticipate needs, identify opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling, and reduce churn by addressing issues before they escalate. We can expect CRM systems to offer predictive analytics, automated customer engagement, and proactive service initiatives. This will not only refine marketing strategies but also transform them into dynamic, adaptive processes

Most people use CRM data for email marketing initiatives but sometimes forget that accurate CRM data also helps attribute revenue properly to the campaigns that brought people in to begin with. Solid CRM data can also be used to create new audience segments to find lookalike audiences for your campaigns or create hyper targeted and personalized remarketing campaigns. Setting up robust tracking for your campaigns can also help you analyze which keywords, campaigns or creative are driving unqualified leads and why.

In short, accurate CRM data is like having an X-ray vision for your business – you can see through the noise and get straight to what your customers truly desire! Which leads to, Higher Conversions, Lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) Better Customer Experience Competitive Edge Rapid Growth And so much more...

Accurate CRM data is the key piece that influences both Marketing strategy and execution. From a strategy perspective, having confidence in the data in your CRM is critical when it comes to understanding the performance of previous campaigns and content. The outcome of those campaigns should be a key driver in influencing the work your team does in the future. From an execution perspective, accurate data is a must-have. The more accurate and complete your data, the more easily you can meet your prospects and customers where they are in the buying process and provide meaningful and impactful value. With accurate data it will also be much easier to determine if a campaign was successful or not.

You may or may not have heard the phrase “if it’s not on CRM, it didn’t happen”, that’s because the foundation of all business management is measurement. Your CRM is fundamentally a centralised system of record and it should be a source of truth. Accurate CRM data are table stakes, and many of the benefits of good CRM data hygiene are taken for granted. However, without it, hacked business intelligence reports deliver poor insight and contribute to errors in decision making. The net result being that a business’ growth will eventually stall out as the rate of brute force customer acquisition meets the rate of customer churn due to poor service delivery caused by misaligned information systems.

Another challenge of having inaccurate CRM data is that it breaks down trust within the reporting process. If data is inaccurate in one area, how can it be trusted in another area? Inaccurate data can not only cause an external issue - but it can also create a disjoint within your internal team.

The CRM data inaccuracy has to be sorted out as quickly as possible, to avoid a long-term collapse. Find the root cause of the inaccuracy. If it's your team's workflow, modify it into a precise and systematic one or just feed the data to a new marketing funnel, to qualify the inaccurate leads.

I don't think there is enough discussion around how much of a waste of resources this can be. Bad CRM data leads to unnecessary costs such targeting incorrect or uninterested buyers and sending emails to spam/junk/fake email addresses. While email marketing might feel "free" or low-cost "a person's average annual email usage produces between three to 40 kilograms of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases or Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e), which is the equivalent of driving between 16 to 206 kilometres in a small petrol car". Having inaccurate or spam emails within your CRM leads to unnecessary waste and environmental degradation.

Making sure that your database is up to date is one of the more challenging aspects of any operations role. There are a few areas of focus: - Understanding organic decay - Doing your own testing and validation - Considering appropriate enrichment sources As people change jobs, your data will become more inaccurate over time. Knowing when and how the data was sourced will help you to know how much confidence you should have in it. Looking for ways to test and validate the data is a critical component as well. Email responses, bouncebacks, etc., are one way you can get feedback passively. Last, considering an enrichment vendor that has the data and accuracy your business needs is an active way to stay on top of data freshness.

Consider having someone specifically dedicated to thinking about, managing, and enriching your data. As privacy regulations become more strict and technologies evolve to support new user/buyer preferences, your focus needs to shift to providing enough value that someone will trust you with their updated information. This doesn't scale as well as buying data from a provider, but the quality of the data will be much higher. You can also use technology in newer and innovative ways to source data at scale. It's always better to compare against sources of information that people are updating voluntarily, rather than on a proprietary database.

This question just made me laugh! Seriously folks, there is no such thing a 100% perfect CRM data. It's all human drive, and mostly SALES driven. About the only thing a SALES person can turn in perfectly is an expense report, and I bet that's fudged! Obviously, do what you can to foster good habits, but there's a fine line between a useful tool and a chore.

It's important to have a data hygiene strategy for your CRM as well as your MAP which feeds into that CRM! If using data cleansing tools ensure you run cleaning and de-duping batches concurrently for both databases before they have a chance to sync.