Halloween is coming up soon! As your company adjusts planned promotional campaigns to be seasonally appropriate, you may be overlooking a Halloween disaster waiting to happen. Check your customer contact database. How much of it can politely be called “dirty data”? If too many of your contacts are unusable for one reason or another, you have something of a zombie situation on your hands.

What is Dirty Data?

Simply put, “dirty data” is any marketing data that can’t be used because it’s outdated or incorrect. This is especially problematic in customer contact info, where customers may have input fake information to avoid being contacted. Obviously, these records are dead ends. Common sources of dirty data include:

• False information: As stated above, some customers deliberately give fake names and contact info to take advantage of an offer without being contacted.
• Expired data: These customers provided legitimate information, but for whatever reason, the provided data no longer works. Maybe they’ve since abandoned the provided email address or switched phone numbers.
• Typos: Even a simple typo can result in an unusable entry, or an embarrassing mistake.
• Duplicate data: This can result in accidentally messaging the same contact multiple times.
• Data in the wrong fields: A customer who accidentally puts a phone number in the email address field could confuse your email automation system.
• Format errors: This can be a mistake on the customer’s part, or the result of a computer hiccup as you transfer data. Either way, the data becomes unreadable.

Whatever the cause, these dirty data entries take up space in your records that could be occupied by actual leads.

The Dirty Data Snowball Effect

A few unusable entries may not seem like a big deal. But if left unchecked, dirty data can snowball. For example, consider the example of a misspelled record. Suppose a customer indicated that they’re the vice president of a company. They could have input this info in a variety of ways, including but not limited to:

• Vice President
• VP
• V.P.
• V. President

To a human, these entries clearly all mean “vice president”. But unfortunately, automated systems aren’t humans. A poorly maintained email automation system will view each of these entries as a completely different title and craft emails accordingly. This affects everything from email personalization to lead generation to confusing marketing reports. What started out as a simple typo snowballed into a significant problem.

Is Dirty Data Really That Bad? Yes

Clearly, typos can create dirty data entries that can give your marketing team a lot of grief. But what about fake names or no-longer-usable contact info? Those are mostly harmless, right?

Unfortunately, no. Dirty data touches nearly every step of the marketing process, including:

• Initial data storage: Many marketing softwares, charge per contact. Useless contacts aren’t just taking up space in your database—they may be quite literally costing you money!
• Personalized messages: Imagine crafting a perfectly personalized email, only for the wrong person to receive it. Worse, what if the email is personalized to someone who provided an obviously fake name? Your message might open with “Dear Superman”. Customers won’t take these kinds of emails seriously.
• Data segmentation: Dirty data interferes with your marketing segments, making it harder to target the right audience.
• Metrics: Incorrect information can result in emails not being delivered, lower clickthrough rates, inaccurate sales numbers, and more.
• Lead nurturing: Your sales department uses the same data as the marketing department to reach out to potential leads. If both departments are using dirty data, they could be shooting themselves in the foot!

How to Perform a Data Checkup

You can and should regularly inspect your customer database for dirty data. However, the best way to remove dirty data from your system is to prevent it from getting in to begin with. At 4Thought Marketing, we’ve developed a simple process to clean up your data:

1. Perform a data review: Look over the data you already have and identify any obvious problems.
2. Remove the bad data: Delete unusable entries and, when possible, correct any that are obviously typos instead of deliberately fake data.
3. Set up a data filtration system: Inspect data as it enters your system and remove any unusable entries.
4. Assign a data manager: Have an employee dedicate their time to reviewing data in the system to catch anything the cloud apps missed.

Prevent the Zombie Apocalypse

There may not be a medical cure for dirty data like there (hopefully) is for a zombie outbreak. But there is a solution. A few extra minutes of work and data inspection can save your company a significant amount of time and money later on.

Get in touch with us today to start clearing the zombies out of your database!

The High Cost of Dirty Data

Dirty data isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a significant barrier to marketing success. Duplicate records, outdated information, inconsistent formatting, and incomplete fields can turn what should be a finely-tuned marketing machine into a costly, inefficient mess. Every day dirty data goes unaddressed is another day of lost opportunities, wasted budget, and skewed metrics. The consequences of dirty data are not just financial, but also strategic, as it can lead to misguided marketing decisions and missed opportunities.

The good news is that these issues can be tackled head-on. By addressing the root causes of dirty data and implementing effective data management practices, companies can transform their marketing efforts and start achieving their desired results, all in an efficient and effective manner.

Achieving marketing precision and maximizing ROI starts with clean, actionable data. Many businesses face challenges in succeeding with data-driven marketing due to hidden obstacles such as poor data quality and incomplete information. Dirty data can derail even the most well-crafted marketing strategies, draining resources and distorting results. By optimizing your database, ensuring compliance, and creating a streamlined contact list, you can drive meaningful engagement.

The Solution: Data Quality and Contact Optimization

Improving data quality means more than just cleaning up errors—it means building a leaner, higher-quality contact list that enhances engagement and efficiency. Here is our approach to improving data quality.

1. Data Cleansing and Segmentation

• Data Cleansing & Deduplication: Identify and merge duplicate contacts, remove outdated details, and use automated validation tools to maintain the quality of your data.
• Segmentation Strategy: Effective segmentation helps focus on the most relevant audiences. Create segments based on engagement, demographics, and behavioral data, ensuring your contact list is high-quality and highly relevant.
• Engagement Scoring & Suppression: Build scoring models that rank contacts by engagement, allowing you to focus on active contacts and suppress or remove those with little value.

2. Data Quality Audits and Practical Solutions

• Comprehensive Data Audits: Perform a full audit to identify common issues, such as misspelled email addresses, inconsistent formats, and duplicates. Automating these checks saves time and minimizes human errors.
• Dirty Data Scorecard: To prioritize cleanup, develop a scorecard that categorizes data issues by severity. This targeted approach helps maintain efficiency and keeps the focus on fields with the most impact.

3. Ensuring Compliance and Privacy

Compliance with privacy laws is crucial for any contact database.

• Privacy Audits (GDPR, CCPA, etc.): Conduct regular audits to ensure your contact data meets current regulations. Contacts that no longer meet privacy standards are automatically removed.
• Contact Preference Management: By integrating preference centers, you ensure your contacts receive only the content they’re interested in and their preferences are respected. Automated workflows help manage contact suppression or deletion based on preference updates.

4. Engagement Optimization Services

Clean data means better engagement. Refine and target your campaigns effectively:

• Targeted Re-engagement Campaigns: Identify low-engagement contacts and use tools to run re-engagement campaigns. If contacts do not respond, consider suppressing them to maintain an active list.
• Personalization & Dynamic Content: Personalized messaging increases relevance and engagement. Use dynamic content to re-engage inactive contacts based on their previous interactions.

5. Long-Term Data Governance

Maintaining clean data is an ongoing process. Establishing a long-term data governance framework is crucial to keeping your contact list in top shape.

• Data Quality Standards: Define standards to ensure consistency across departments and reduce the likelihood of errors.
• Team Collaboration on Data Entry: Alignment between marketing, sales, and operations teams is crucial. Implement structured data entry protocols to improve data consistency, such as dropdowns instead of free-form fields.
• Routine Data Cleansing: Regular data reviews remove outdated or incorrect information before it impacts a campaign. Automated and manual checks are combined for the best results.
• Governance Framework: Establishing transparent data practices ensures ongoing quality control and prevents data issues from reoccurring.

Key Benefits of Data Quality Improvement

• Lower Marketing Costs: A leaner contact list means reduced database costs.
• Higher Engagement: Focus your resources on actively engaged contacts to boost campaign performance.
• Improved Compliance: Stay on top of privacy regulations and minimize risks.
• Better Campaign ROI: Clean, targeted data leads to more effective campaigns and a higher return on investment.

Take the Next Step with Data Quality Services from 4Thought Marketing

Don’t let dirty data hold your marketing back. Partner with 4Thought Marketing to optimize your database, reduce costs, and enhance your marketing success. Our tailored solutions will help you build a compliant, lean, and engaged contact list that drives results. Whether you need us to manage the entire project or tackle specific tasks, or if you want to empower your team with our training, we’re here to help. Contact us today to take the next step towards data-driven marketing success!

Modern business demands a lot from professionals. Systems like Eloqua work wonders to lighten the load, but sometimes they need a little help—especially where dirty data is involved. We work to provide the additional boost Eloqua needs to keep our customers in business. Here’s how 4Thought’s suite of Eloqua apps improved lead generation for Sophos.

About Sophos

Sophos provides comprehensive cybersecurity solutions for almost 400,000 businesses in more than 150 countries. Based out of the UK, the company has four other locations around the world. Their customer list includes such diverse clients as the Diocese of Brooklyn, the Washakie County School District, Del Monte, People’s Independent Bank, and many more. Sophos also offers a family version of their cybersecurity software for individual subscribers. But whether Sophos is marketing their products and services to fortune 500 companies or a local family, they rely on lead generation as much as any other company. And unfortunately, customers aren’t making their job easy.

Problem #1: Dirty Data

Sophos uses multiple free trials offers to generate new customer leads from anyone willing to fill out a short customer-facing form. There was certainly no shortage of interested parties submitting these forms. According to a 2017 survey, most B2B companies report that 66% or 2 out of 3 free trial users end up converting once their trial expires. Quality leads through free trials were and continue to be a valuable asset, to companies as a whole and to Sophos in particular.

However, much of the information submitted in these forms were unusable. People might provide an invalid email address or even list their name as “Mickey Mouse”. Far too much of the data coming from these forms fell into this category of “dirty data”. And if it wasn’t caught in time, the unusable information made its way to the sales team, who then had to spend additional time sorting genuine contacts from tire kickers.

Receiving fake data is surprisingly common, especially in the privacy and security fields. “People are exceptionally apprehensive about giving their personal details because they are in the security space,” said Corey Lysohirka, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Sophos. “In our industry, people are less likely to provide us with their personal information.” While expected, the influx of unusable information was certainly a problem.

The Sophos team did their best to isolate dirty data once it entered their system. Their Eloqua setup included nearly 400 rules to locate bad information but lacked a straightforward and automated method to delete it.

Problem #2: Poor Lead Flow

Like many companies, Sophos works hard to promote its products and services at public events like trade shows and webinars. These marketing events can result in many new contacts and potential leads. However, contacts from events require near-immediate follow-ups to prevent the conversation from going stale. Sophos’ lead processing system segmented the contact data in Eloqua and marked them to be processed as leads, but that’s where it stopped. Eloqua’s Program Canvas only allows contacts to enter workflows at midnight each night. This caused lengthy delays in getting sales-ready leads into the sales team’s hands and caused the leads to go cold. Sophos needed a solution.

The Solution: Data Filtering & Lead Acceleration Apps from 4Thought Marketing

Corey first noticed 4Thought Marketing while examining the Eloqua cloud app catalog. Impressed with the range of apps and capabilities he saw, he requested that Sophos get in touch with them. From there it was a simple process to find the right apps to solve the problem.

4Thought has developed a suite of apps that extend Eloqua’s functionality and further streamline the marketing process. The first app considered was the Contact Garbage Indicator. This app screens every contact entering Eloqua and singles out potential bad data. This bad data is then held for manual review to prevent false positives. Once the data has been reviewed, the Contact Garbage Indicator empties its data storage and continues to filter incoming contacts.

The Contact Garbage Indicator works in tandem with another app from 4Thought Marketing, the Contact Deleter App. This app does exactly what its name implies—it purges bad contacts routed into it. The Sophos team is especially fond of this one. The team simply has to drop the object into the canvas and then, as Corey puts it, “You just route every garbage contact record that you want to be deleted out of Eloqua to that object and the app simply deletes the garbage record.”

But while both of these apps root out bad data that has already made its way into the system, legitimate customer contacts still need attention as potential leads. Sophos uses the Contact Cloud Feeder app to accelerate lead flow in Campaign Canvas. Instead of having to wait for overnight processes to transfer lead data between programs, the team set up the app to check for newly added contacts every 5 minutes. The app then begins processing, getting leads into the hands of sales reps faster. The process is fully automatic and fits right into their current Eloqua setup. No need to refresh segments, and no need to wait overnight for programs to refresh!

Results: Improved Quality & Processing Speed

With their new setup, Sophos’ data intake has never been better. The Contact Cloud Feeder App kicks off the cycle of processing incoming contacts as leads. The Contact Garbage Indicator then examines each lead for possible dirty data and filters it out. Finally, the Contact Deleter removes the bad data from the system entirely. With all the administrative work done automatically, Sophos is free to focus on generating and nurturing new leads without worrying about bad contacts.

The Sophos team is also exploring live email validation. When someone fills out a customer-facing form, the website will quickly verify that the domain for the provided email address actually exists, otherwise, it will not allow the form to submit. In the long term, Sophos plans to use this validation system to further filter bad data.

Write Your Own Success Story

Sophos has managed to drastically improve its data quality and lead flow with 4Thought Marketing’s suite of Eloqua apps. Dirty data is not a problem unique to them, however. Virtually any company could find itself dealing with bad contacts. Why not give our apps a try and streamline your marketing team’s workday? Contact us today for more information.