Are you keeping years’ worth of customer data around with the idea that it will help you with your marketing endeavors? Contrary to what you may think, that is ‘actually’ damaging your database as a whole.
Yes, keeping customer information around is damaging your database. Here’s why: More than half of the population changes its job position every year. Many of those job changes completely change the industry that an individual is working in.
Beyond that, a massive portion of the population also changes its contact information every year.
It means that the information you collected in your database quickly becomes inaccurate when you leave it muddied with old, outdated client profiles.
- You Can Understand Your Current Results
When you clean up your database, you will get a much deeper understanding of why your marketing efforts are the way they currently are.
As you are cleaning, you will find contacts that are no longer reachable at their recorded address or phone number. You will find:
- Emails that have been abandoned,
- Prospects that no longer need your service,
- Various other bits of information will keep you from wasting your time to entice those who no longer need these services!
You will also see where your engagement is coming from and where to focus your efforts at. Perhaps, with your outdated database, you have witnessed lackluster results. It is not because your content or service is low-quality but because you are marketing to people who are no longer reachable or need your business.
- You’ll Prevent Getting Blacklisted
As the internet has developed, platform creators have recognized the need to limit or remove spam. Hopefully, you are not the type to use underhanded marketing tactics. However, you must ensure that your presumably innocent marketing strategies aren’t spamming because they can get you blacklisted as if they were.
It is because an inaccurate database often causes you to send emails to accounts no longer active. Email service providers utilize inactive accounts to stop spammers. They do this by noticing the accounts that frequently send emails to inactive accounts and blacklisting them from the platform. If you are not aware that your email list contains hundreds of emails that are no longer active, you can quickly become blacklisted from an entire email platform.
- Marketing Prioritization Becomes Possible
Being able to see inactive emails, active emails that are engaging, and active emails that aren’t engaging allows you to do a few things to prioritize your marketing, too.
First and foremost, you should remove all inactive emails from your mailing list. However, it is the insight into how many non-engaging active accounts you have that can make a huge difference in your success.
When you see how many people are still using their active emails but not opening your emails, you can decide how to go about marketing. Should you try to re-engage those disinterested contacts? Should you move on and develop new leads? The choice is yours, but it is a lot easier to make a good decision when you can see exactly how many people have become disinterested in your current database.
It also allows you to reorganize a little bit. As you notice accounts engaging with your brand, you can move them over to the “active” list and prioritize that list with your marketing efforts.
If you do re-engage older email recipients, it’s important not to let that second chance go to waste. Make sure you prioritize those re-engaged contacts in future marketing endeavors. To re-engage contacts, you can offer a discount or a similar deal that entices them to try your service again.
- Increased Data Accuracy
In the same way that stockpiling outdated data makes your database far less accurate, cleaning out that outdated data does the opposite. When you take the time to remove duplicate contacts, inactive contacts, and disinterested contacts that haven’t been re-engaged, you ensure that the data you are using to generate a marketing strategy is as accurate as possible.
With inaccurate data, you can end up becoming an annoyance to your contact list, and your entire marketing strategy will have a weak foundation in general.
