Inaccurate data may be killing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and causing you to miss new business opportunities.
Errors, duplicates, and generally poor data can easily leave a bad impression on both your customers and prospects. Inaccurate data chips away at your business credibility, suggesting to others that you really don’t care about data compliance.
Here are 4 ways inaccurate data affects your business.
Inaccurate data costs money
The most obvious consequence of inaccurate data is the financial impact it can have. Marketing letters, brochures and emails may not reach their intended audience, resulting in wasted money. Duplicate records increase costs, and can be so simply avoided. The costs to cleanse data are often minimal when compared to the amount of wasted costs using poor quality data.
Inaccurate data wastes time
Poor quality data can take up so much of your time, it takes you away from running your company. It’s not just the time spent from a marketing perspective, but also from a sales and finance point of view. Imagine how much time sales teams could be wasting by sending duplicate quotes, or chasing leads that will never close. By sending invoices to inaccurate data, your finance team will become frustrated by having to repeat the process again. All of this takes time, and within business, time is money.
It can affect your employees
When marketing campaigns fail and sales teams don’t get enough high-quality leads, morale within the business can seriously drop. Staff could lose confidence in their ability to do their job. And when it affects their earning potential, they may even become inclined to look for alternative employment. Your staff are there to generate income for your business, so it’s only fair that they’re given the correct tools. You wouldn’t expect a mechanic to fix a car with a knife & fork, would you. Without your staff retaining focus on your business, then there’s no business at all.
Don’t forget, you have compliance obligations
Since GDPR came into play in May 2018, the spotlight has been firmly placed on data protection. The consequences of failing to take this seriously can be catastrophic, with the potential for huge fines. Put simply, Data Protection is something that every company needs to take responsibility for. But it’s not just the potential for fines that you have to consider, it’s your reputation. Contacting someone who is deceased, for example, can lead to complaints. And if the breach is worthy, the ICO may publish details in the public space. Remember, fines can be paid, but reputation damage can be much longer-lasting.
As you can see, inaccurate data could adversely affect your whole business, not just your role. Companies that ignore poor data issues within their organisation risk their competition getting there first and closing that deal. Worse still, the potential for complaints and adverse publicity have to be avoided wherever possible.
It’s now time to work on cleaning your data. Implement regular data health checks, and update and append your database regularly for more accurate targeting.
So, stop wasting time and money, and show your employees and your customers that you care.
We adhere to the Chartered Institute of Marketing code of practice and regularly clean our data
For more help and advise then please do call us on 01274 965411 or email us info@databubble.co.uk
