Spring Cleaning: Tips for Keeping Clean Data 06/17/16 | So we know data is important, but how do you maintain databases so that they continue to be helpful instead of stressful? Let us help you with some spring cleaning to get you to effective database management. Be Aware of Contact Expiration Dates. You wouldn’t just leave groceries sitting in your fridge for months on end without being concerned about their quality. The same concept is true about your leads and contacts– they have an expiration date. Up to 25% of your data expires annually. This may be a shocking figure at first, but when you consider that the average job is only held for about two years in today’s fast-paced business world, it makes sense. Understand Your Target Market. It’s not enough to just know who you want your customer to be, you must know who they actually are. This requires collecting and tracking data on their needs, web activity, and persona. Once you understand who your target market actually is, market reporting and analysis is easy to conduct and execute. Personalize Your Marketing Strategy. Without a specific destination in mind, analyzing data will get your marketing nowhere. After setting goals for your campaigns and getting to know your customers, you can begin cleaning up your data. This clean data will ultimately propel your efforts towards success– After all, “Without clean data, there is simply no way you can have dynamic, engaging, and (most importantly) personalized marketing” Quality Control. “To be able to correlate data quality issues to business impacts, we must be able to classify our data quality expectations as well as our business impact criteria,” said David Loshin, President of Knowledge Integrity, Inc. Do you have set quality standards and expectations for you data collection? If you don’t, you could be losing leads and revenue. Without quality standards, your data’s completeness, conformity, accuracy, and integrity could be compromised.