BENEFITS OF CLEANING UP YOUR HUBSPOT CONTACTS DATABASE

Contacts are the center of HubSpot's growth stack story. This crucial resource is the main character that weaves through sales and marketing to generate returns. But how bad does it get when vital business data isn't in great shape? Or what happens when the database isn't as clean as it should be?

You can never count on an erroneous database to send marketing material to your audience, prospects, and customers. Without filtering the data, you may fail to reach most of the individuals that form the database. You also risk sending the same material to a particular client one, two, or more times.

To maintain an excellent company reputation and get peace of mind, it would help if you ensured that this data is cleaned before introducing it to your marketing campaign.

What's The Big Deal about HubSpot Contact Cleaning?

You have clients on a consistent bouncing spree, lots of old contacts with questionable origins, and those that you're sure will be there temporarily. Tracking the different groups of customers actionably can be a tricky affair. It's even harder when you have an extended contacts list.

You can avoid the entire hassle by carrying out a thorough data cleansing on your HubSpot contact list.  

In essence, data cleaning involves preparing it for analysis or usage by editing and eliminating incorrect, irrelevant, incomplete, and duplicate information. HubSpot Data cannot effectively address these issues. In fact, it could potentially alter your marketing campaign outcomes if you use it without cleaning your data first.

The Data Cleaning Process

Cleaning your HubSpot contacts database isn't just erasing outdated and broken records. The process covers a more extensive scope of creating consistency through the database and providing confidence in the reliability of the data you intend to use. Some of the standard duties carried out in the cleaning process include:

• Eliminating bad data
• Correcting syntax and spelling errors
• Standardizing record formatting across the data
• Filling out the blank fields

The ultimate purpose of data cleaning is to create several specific vital traits in your contact database, such as:

• Validity: the term refers to the different constraints which determine the information within your database that's effective and usable. This may refer to the data stored within established criteria that recognize the data to be valid.
• Accuracy: You must have precise data to make accurate estimates and projections for the business. Precision also offers you peace of mind when presenting marketing material to customers and prospects.
• Completeness: Whenever your records have most of the required fields empty, it could be problematic. The most likely result would be errors when sending your brand message.
• Data uniformity: All the contact data in your database must maintain a consistent format and structure for ease of use and quicker integration into campaigns.

Why You Should Cleanse Your Contacts Database

If done right, data cleansing will offer lots of benefits to your sales, customer, and virtual marketing databases. The primary gains of an effective HubSpot contacts database cleaning approach include:

It Improves Your Decision-Making Process

You need insights from your data to make decisions - better business data, better decisions. With clean and accurate data, you'll have the confidence to make crucial resolutions. If you've suffered losses resulting from unclean data in the past, the resolutions you make will not take a data-backed approach.

Thanks to regular data cleaning of your HubSpot contacts database, you'll always make the correct decisions, even if you have less time to make your considerations.

Clean Data Boosts Productivity

What's the average time taken by your employees to deal with the inconveniences resulting from bad data? This is a crucial question that encompasses the different actions taken by your staff members. The number of hours your marketing team spends editing, adding, and amending the available information consistently to achieve an accurate data set. The time they take to respond to dissatisfied clients and prospects who received the corrupt news.

Also, consider the time taken by sales representatives to sort through records and identify duplicates to have an extensive view of a particular client's history with your brand. 

Data cleaning offers a one-time solution for all these, and you'll save time for other productive endeavors in the business.

You'll Understand Your Customers Better

Your HubSpot marketing strategy's success is almost entirely dependent on your ability to understand and address your client's needs, concerns, and pain points. Incorrect or incomplete data will translate to an equally incorrect or incomplete understanding of your clients.

When you are confident with your contacts database, that confidence will cascade down to your intercommunications with clients, and you'll understand them better. With a deeper understanding of your customers, you'll easily improve your interaction with them right from when they're prospects to making their first purchase to being a regular customer.

It Improves Your Customer Acquisition Actions

One major issue with bad data is the misalignment between sales and marketing departments, and the challenge can significantly plague the company's lead quality. Marketing departments usually send unqualified leads to their sales counterparts, leading to time wastage in handling the bad leads.

When you clean your contacts database, marketing teams will be able to send better leads to sales. This results in an enhanced long-term alignment. Accurate data can help in qualifying, and categorizing leads using effective lead scoring. It can also help in nurturing leads to be passed to sales when they're ready.

You'll Have Fewer Data Duplication Instances

Duplicate data is a major concern for most companies with HubSpot contact databases. It makes it harder to report and may also skew your numbers. The data can also lead to misinformed estimates and projections. This may prompt sending the same material to a prospect multiple times.

Despite the dangers of data duplication, most entrepreneurs still fail to deal with it. In some databases, the amount of duplicate information may go beyond 20 percent. This is because they use traditional data quality solutions that miss the majority of the duplicates. On the other hand, data cleaning considers this problem to be low-hanging fruit, and the process can deal with the issue entirely.

Data Cleaning Cuts on Budget Waste

Inaccurate, outdated, and duplicated data in HubSpot contacts databases leads to massive waste. According to a recent study, bad data costs U.S. companies up to $3 trillion every year.

For instance, you may send campaigns to bouncing emails, and your prospects may receive duplicate campaigns. There's also the risk of delivering messages with outdated or incorrect data, which may damage your company's perception.

Data cleaning can effectively cut the budget wastes, and you'll get the maximum returns on your marketing spend.

Key Takeaway

Maintaining a clean HubSpot contacts database can be compared to visiting the gym. The more you practice, the easier it gets for you. Similarly, the more you clean the database and rid it of bad data, the better the health of the crucial business information, and you'll have an easy time in the next cleanups.

The above benefits show just how crucial the process is to your business. But you cannot do it successfully without the appropriate tools and know-how. A knowledgeable professional by your side will guide you on how you can clean the data and get the most out of it.

If you need help cleaning up your HubSpot contact database, or want to make this a client project, please reach out to your PM!

Or if you would like to speak about how we can help you offload the technical HubSpot work, so you can focus on strategy and growth... please contact Gabrielle Paris at gabrielle@onthefuze.com or on LinkedIn.