Businesses need to take a long-term view when it comes to data
There’s more to the customer data journey than collecting an email address, writes Validity Inc manager customer success APAC, Nhan Tran.
Preventative maintenance is a necessary (if not particularly exciting) part of life. If you don’t service your car or go to the dentist, the results aren’t great. It’s the same with customer relationships, however in this case, the oxygen that sustains the lifecycle is good quality data. And despite what some businesses might like to think, getting your customer data in order is far from a once-off, set-and-forget activity.
Consequences of taking a short-term view
The consequences of not prioritising data are far-reaching and most businesses don’t realise how significantly it can impact revenue. Validity’s State of CRM Data Management report found that 44% of businesses estimate poor quality data is costing them between 5% and 20% in revenue. That’s huge.
Take a business that suspects it has issues with its subscriber data because it’s experiencing high bounce rates. They take action to address this by implementing a tool that validates email addresses in their database and removes invalid entries. This is a great start, but often they won’t take this any further by adopting an ongoing maintenance plan. This means that they’re opening the back door for more dodgy email addresses to potentially enter their database as they’re trying to push invalid addresses out the front door.
