Data is a vital part of any business. In marketing, data helps you make better decisions such as budget allocation, evaluating the success of a campaign or activity, and setting an effective marketing strategy.
Most businesses understand they need accurate tracking on their website to make informed decisions and usually focus on platforms like Google Analytics. However, cleansing your HubSpot CRM data is as important as identifying where your traffic came from and you should invest time and resource into eradicating ‘dirty’ data.
Poor quality records in your HubSpot CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can be a result of importing data without cleansing it beforehand, or due to spam contacts filling in forms on your website. Data cleansing should be a vital part of your marketing strategy because without it, the business decisions you make are likely based on incorrect or incomplete data.
We've summarised the key benefits of removing bad data from your HubSpot CRM.
Benefits of Removing Bad Data in HubSpot
Increase Revenue Opportunities
Bad data in your CRM can be caused by data not being inputted consistently. Inconsistent CRM data can have a big impact on many areas of your CRM including lead scoring, segmentation, workflows and reporting.
For example, a job title of ‘Chief Financial Officer’ could be inputted into your CRM as ‘CFO’, ‘Financial Controller’ or ‘CF Officer’. So, if you wanted to run an ABM campaign targeting your ideal customer profile of ‘Chief Financial Officer’, you would need to know that those contacts have different variations of the same job title. Failure to know this would mean that you’re missing out on targeting key accounts and effectively missing out on revenue. Therefore, having a standardised data entry formatting process will ensure that data in your CRM is consistent and clean, to ensure your marketing efforts have the greatest chance of generating an ROI.
Make Better Decisions
Assessing the effectiveness of your sales and marketing activities or attributing revenue back to specific channels will be inaccurate, or in some cases impossible, when you’re working with poor quality or out-of-date data. For instance, data entry mistakes and conflicting or duplicate data, can result in inaccurate analysis of your marketing tactics, resulting in poor decision making which ultimately negatively impacts your bottom line.
Therefore, taking the time to invest in your CRM data hygiene will ensure that your data analytics process and data collection is accurate and that your analysis is based on trustworthy, accurate and reliable data. We recommend having a HubSpot CRM data clean-up strategy to give you a clearer picture of your sales and marketing performance and facilitate decision making that leads to growth and success.
Improve Cost-Savings & Efficiencies
All elements of your MarTech stack need to be delivering an ROI. When it comes to your CRM, the toolset can only deliver value if your data is clean, up-to-date, and enriched.
Cost-Savings
It’s crucial that you only invest in contacts who are genuinely interested and engaged with your product or service. In HubSpot, you pay for the contact data you market to, known as ‘marketing contacts’. Having a data cleaning process is absolutely
Efficiencies
Naturally, some of your CRM data will go out of date over time. This can be due to contacts leaving companies or changing personal information such as email addresses, postal addresses or phone numbers. Nurturing these contacts reduces the productivity of your SDR (Sales development Reps), BDR (Business Development Reps) or Sales teams as they are wasting their time reaching out to contacts with out-of-date information. Therefore, it’s important to have internal processes in place to stay on top of data quality and relevance.
These types of data inaccuracies can also cause your teams to lose trust in the data or the systems and lead to friction and a siloed mentality between your marketing and sales teams.
Align Sales Reps & Marketing Teams
Having clean data in HubSpot will help streamline the sales hand-off process, which is often a source of tension for many businesses. Despite working with the same data, sales and marketing teams can become disconnected, with sales teams missing out on vital context that they need before speaking to prospects.
Having clean data and a consistent CRM data strategy in HubSpot will enable sales and marketing teams to align on the ideal customer profiles to pursue, which creates better alignment between the teams, as well as a more seamless journey for your prospects and customers.
Facilitate Data Integrity
Sometimes, HubSpot is the only CRM used by a business, so ensuring that there’s no bad data is vital in order to create an accurate and reliable single source of truth to base decisions on.
Other times, businesses have a complex tech stack, filled with multiple platforms and teams. Here, data integrity is vital as the data needs to match across the whole tech stack in order to facilitate alignment across platforms and between teams.
Improve Email Health
Poorly Engaged Contacts
Bad data can come from bought lists or prospecting tools that feed cold, unengaged leads into a CRM. Bought lists tend to contain poor quality data or contacts with low engagement, with contacts who have typically never heard of your business.
This cold data can result in a higher number of bounced or unsubscribed contacts, which will negatively impact your deliverability metrics and overall email health. Failure to clean up your HubSpot data could even result in your email address becoming blacklisted, meaning your emails would automatically be blocked from sending or would be sent straight to the recipient's spam folder! This is why investing in HubSpot CRM data cleansing is vital if you want to protect or improve your email health.
Duplicate Records
Bad data can also create duplicate records. Duplicate data might simply be multiple variants of a contact record based on different email addresses or different sources. This can lead to bloat within your HubSpot portal and drive software costs up.
However, duplicate accounts can lead to worse issues. Duplicate companies within your CRM can lead to contacts being associated to the wrong company or lead scoring models failing to pick up on hot leads that match your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). This type of duplication isn’t always a mistake or a technical error within the data but can sometimes simply be a nuance in how a target organisation is structured, making it difficult for a CRM to automatically (and correctly) identify when a contact record should be associated to a specific company.
This is where working with a dedicated team of HubSpot specialists like Innovation Visual can pay off. We can help build best practice automations and mechanisms to keep your data clean and up to date, enabling your teams to better spend their time focusing on the parts of the data that a CRM and automation cannot fix.
Bringing together our MarTech experience with your team’s unique knowledge of your products, services, prospects and customers, means we can turn your dirty data into a CRM powerhouse that drives leads through the pipeline.
What You Need to Do Now
1. Assess Your Current CRM Situation
Hopefully by now you realise that HubSpot data cleansing should be a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. However, cleaning up your HubSpot CRM isn't just as simple as conducting a routine data clean-up. Appropriate time needs to be spent investigating and thinking things through to manage your contact records in a way that will save you time, money and ensure higher ROI.
You need to now take a step back and assess your CRM situation. When was the last time your CRM data got cleansed? Has your CRM
2. Decide Who Is Going to Develop & Implement Data Cleansing
You now need to consider who is going to manage the process of data management within your CRM. Some businesses have a designated CRM manager, however we typically find that it works best when businesses enlist the help of outsourced experts, who have dedicated MarTech teams that have years of experience with CRM management and data cleansing.
Innovation Visual: Data Cleansing Experts
Innovation Visual boasts a team of MarTech experts who are highly experienced in data cleansing within HubSpot and other CRM platforms. We're also proud to be a HubSpot partner agency offering a variety of specialist MarTech and inbound marketing services.
Contact us today to find out more about how our team of highly skilled experts can help your business with its data cleansing strategy and make the most of your HubSpot investment.
