Keeping your marketing automation and CRM clean and organized can be a daunting challenge, just like keeping a house neat with a walking toddler in it. While you can’t prevent inconsistent data from entering your database completely, you can eliminate the pain with strategic cleansing processes.

Why is this important? Studies have shown that bad data can cost businesses 10-25% of their company’s revenue (Hubspot). In other words, don’t let this happen to you!

We put together some of the best tips to keep your database clean and maintaining quality throughout:

1. Make it a monthly or quarterly effort to purge or suspend junk/disqualified leads, bad data, invalid emails, or old leads with no activity. You can even create the lists/reports to pick these up and revisit them each time. U.S. companies believe 32% of their data is inaccurate (Uberflip). This bad data leads to less effective sales and marketing campaigns.
2. Identify and update people no longer at the company with enrichment tools or you can use Drift email on your campaigns to automate it.
3. Make sure you are “foldering”, tagging, and using clear naming conventions for campaign assets and workflows in your MA solution. This is especially important for tools like Pardot and Hubspot.
4. Archive any unused reports, views, or dashboards in your CRM, and all old campaigns or processes in your marketing automation. Having a “sell by” date for all of these makes sense to establish globally. Moreover, kill things off if they haven't been used or are older than “x” amount of months or years.

Maintaining data cleanliness is an ongoing process. Think quality over quantity. The key is to make it a habit and not a reaction when things get out of control. By putting time in auditing your marketing automation platforms and CRM, you will reap greater benefits over time. For any business, reliable information is the foundation you can consistently look to for better insights and metrics.