It’s a Monday morning – the sweat on your brow’s building and the coffee in your cup is disappearing at an alarming rate. 

 

The culprit? 

 

That marketing email. The dreaded email you promised to send out to your email list at 9:01 that very morning is meant to be highly personalised. The only issue is, you don’t have clean data to make it personalised.

 

How can you address each person by their first name if you only have them recorded for exactly 27.3% of your list? You thought about sending it with a filler for anybody you don’t have information for, but who wants to be addressed as a ‘valued partner’, ‘first name here’ or ‘person’?

 

Your email marketing will go cold way before your coffee does. How can you keep your marketing converting when you’re not sure of who you’re exactly targeting?

 

Build an Email List the Right Way

 

Email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023, so it’s a good thing to get right. And it’s certainly not dead. 

 

If your goal is to build your customer base, entice new contacts to subscribe to your email list. An effective way to create a successful campaign is to provide an incentive or content in exchange for their details like a discount or a free item, or even a complementary service you would usually charge for. GDPR calls for legitimate interest or validated consent to be considered when creating an email list, without these you’re not complying. 

 

Here’s the thing: email marketing is only as good as the base behind it. To learn what ‘high quality’ data means to you, first identify what unclean data looks like. Because without high quality data, you’ll have:

 

• Trouble segmenting data
• Too many complex workarounds
• Challenges personalising your emails

 

Marketing gives you the real opportunity to personalise at scale, so making your data clean should be your top priority. 

 

How to Tell if you Have Unclean Data in your Database

• You have Incomplete Data

Oftentimes unclean data is incomplete, meaning that you may be missing a first name here, a last name there, maybe even an email address or two. Registered company numbers are likely the most accurate as these aren’t subject to change in the same way so you can use these on sales intelligence platforms like Zint to find more information on them to complete your email fields. 

• The Data is Old

Verifying information in your CRM or Marketing database can be tricky – how can you tell if it’s inaccurate? A phone number wrongly typed out can be difficult to identify, if it has the same number of digits. 

 

 

• Your Database is Poorly Organised

To identify a healthy dataset, look past the data itself. It should be structured in a readable and cohesive way, so when you come to use certain fields for email marketing, they’re all aligned and in one column, not dotted about with multiple fields that pull the same variables.

• You have a High Unsubscribe Rate

Pumped out email marketing to a crowd that just wasn’t interested? The more you keep a record of unsubscribed contacts, the more likely you are to accidentally send emails to them – as long as they’re in your database, there’s a high chance. Don’t have unengaged contacts sitting idle in your database, it’s best to remove them regularly. To prevent unengaged contacts, try setting automation to trigger an email asking them if your contacts if they still find your email list useful, if not, automatically unsubscribe them.

The Solution? Cleansing your Unclean Data the Right Way

 

Beware of GDPR compliance – failing to can result in more than a monetary fine. Damage to your reputation is something that’s hard to pick back up – more emails will fall into people’s spam folder (increasing the likelihood of you being blacklisted as a spam account) as your IP takes a hit. 

 

If you’re buying data, you need to be privy to where that data came from, and it needs to be filtered in a way that creates an email list of contacts that you believe to have legitimate interest – anything short of this can be risky. 

 

Have you bought data but needed to clean it up in order to use it effectively for marketing? Data cleansing is easy if you know how to… or if you have the right sales intelligence platform. When the only way to verify data is to match it against other records, it’s easier to cross reference it. The Zint platform can help you cleanse your data, simply book a demo to see how we can fill in the gaps of your unclean data. 

 

If you’re not at that stage yet, take a look for yourself on how we can help, or download our FREE checklist for healthier email lists.