How accurate is your data?

On February 17, 2016, Posted by Del Jones , In Data,Lead Generation Advice, With No Comments

You’ve probably invested a significant amount of time, money and resources over the years collating your marketing database. You’re most likely already emailing, sending newsletters and generally keeping in touch with your contacts in the hope that they’ll eventually buy from you.

However, have you ever considered how accurate your data might be? 63% of UK businesses have out-of-date customer data¹, and according to a recent report from Forrester Research Inc. “Customer management professionals tell us that poor data management is one of the biggest barriers to getting value from their CRM systems.”

With people changing roles within companies, moving jobs, or even retiring, studies have shown that B2B data accuracy declines at a rate of 40% per year². If you consider that, according to Dun & Bradstreet, every 30 minutes 20 CEOs leave their jobs, this isn’t really surprising.

If you have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in place, this can help you to maximise the value you gain from your existing contact list (if used correctly). And whilst Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics dominate the high-end CRM space, platforms such as Agile CRM, Active Campaign, Nimble, Intouch, Insightly and many others offer platforms for smaller businesses that are all designed to utilise social media and email marketing to gather data.

Combined with your CRM, your email marketing platform can help you to keep data up-to-date to a certain extent. Platforms such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact provide you with a list of “bounces” with each email campaign that you send, which highlights the contacts from your list that the email did not successfully send to, indicating an error with that contact’s email address. However, with email marketing database accuracy degrading by about 22.5% every year³, many of your emails will still be delivered to people who have changed roles, changed companies or even retired, and you’ll never know.

So how do you know that your messages are being seen by the appropriate people within your target companies? What none of the CRM or email platforms will be able to do is confirm if the contact is still in the role or even if they still work at the same company.

LinkedIn can help alleviate this problem to a certain degree and is a fantastic source of information. A simple tip you can use from time to time is type your prospect’s name into Google or Bing and more often than not you’ll find their LinkedIn profile pops up. The data on LinkedIn is updated by the users themselves, so whilst not always 100% accurate, it does provide an excellent means to check if your prospect’s job title, and the company they work for, are aligned with what you have in your own contact data.

With that in mind, amending your data with LinkedIn can help to ensure that you are targeting your marketing efforts in the right places, and with 50-75% of B2B marketing success being down to the accuracy of data⁴, an up-to-date contact list is invaluable.

Branching Out Europe can help verify your data, using social media and search engines. If you’d like to discuss this, please get in touch using one of the options below: