Is Dirty Data Losing You Sales? Find Out!

Every salesperson and marketer knows the importance of their contact list.

It’s a treasure trove full of potential customers that can, provided you send them the right information at the right time, become your dear customers.

This may be old news for people in sales and marketing, but it’s probably breaking news for startups. Data decay happens incredibly fast today.

To help you understand this statement better – go through the phonebook on your smartphone, see if all the numbers you saved can actually be used and still belong to that one person. Who the hell is John G?

Now you can imagine what happens to the list of complete strangers that you haven’t heard from in months or maybe even years.

What happens when your list is not updated?

The worst thing that happens is that you end up emailing people that no longer work at the certain company or no longer have that jobs title.

Now, this makes you seem like a newbie who couldn’t bother to update their prospect list.

Next thing you know, you’re being labeled as spam left and right!

You are basically endangering your entire sales process. Trust us, you don’t want to get blacklisted by your email provider.

Moreover, because you are emailing people who might not be relevant anymore, you are actually losing money since most email services charge by the number of emails sent.

But, that’s not all. You are also wasting your sales reps’ time when they could be using to to contact people who actually have a chance of converting to customers.

Oh, and another thing – GDPR. Depending on the location of your prospects, definitely be careful with where you got your list, why you’re still keeping a prospect’s data, if they know that you have their data and what you’re emailing them about.

Check out our GDPR Guide to Cold Emailing.

And those are only the biggest things. There are many reasons to clean your list.

Source: Business2Community

Once your list is clean, you will be able to make meaningful connections and relationships with those who are actually interested in your service or product.

When to clean your contact list?

The frequency of your data appending (as we marketing and sales experts like to call it) depends on the origin of the prospect list or how you’ve attracted your leads, and the size of your list, but one thing is for sure – it MUST be cleaned.

If you bought prospect lists from a dubious source that was probably scraped off the internet the right time would be riiight about – now.

In case you had a freelancer or a specialized agency do your list building for you, clean the list every couple of months or in the worst case scenario, once a year.

The same goes for the lists you built yourself.

As far as the list size is concerned, the bigger the list – the more often it needs to be updated.

And if your approach to lead generation wasn’t targeted well, expect many unfit contacts in your list. Definitely time for a cleanse.

How to clean your prospect list?

You can always do it yourself by following up on your contacts.

Check the email addresses, check the job titles, check for duplicates, check if all the data is in the right fields, check if all the mandatory fields have the relevant information, etc.

If your list is huge it will take you a lot of time that you may not have.

You can follow the opens and replies in your email automation flow and delete the ones that are neither opening nor replying to your messages. They probably just like their Inbox full.

A similar procedure would be to contact those that reached the end of your automation flow and ask them if you should keep sending them emails.

Don’t spam people that are just not interested or signed up out of sheer curiosity. Be responsible when doing business and face the facts.

All your lists are easily customizable and keeping contacts in it just for the sake of its size doesn’t make any sense in this day and age.

The most time-saving option is to outsource your list cleansing to someone who is specialized in prospect list building.

The selected person or an agency will dedicate all their time to research people on your list and check if their contact information is still accurate by doing multiple verifications.

That’s precisely what Market Republic does. Our semi-automated process which combines human intellect and automation technology makes sure that your data hygiene is up to par.

Our full-time employees will devote their time to go through your CRM, re-verify all your data, remove the duplicates as well as update it with as many data points as you need so that you can focus on closing deals.

Does your prospect list need updating?

Does your smartphone phone book need updating?

You know the answer to this question, but you never seem to find the time.

If you have a large list of contacts that are not replying and you’re seeing large bounce rate – there’s your first sign of warning.

Purchased lists that you never used or used long time ago can also be a large source of useless contacts.

Then, purchased lists in general. Remember, good lists are not for sale. If you’ve bought your prospects lists in bulk from someone, there’s a serious chance that they’re very outdated.

If you collected the prospects yourself, but now they seem like there is not enough information – they can be updated.

If you’re a startup thinking contacting everyone inside a potential customer company would be a good idea – you definitely need an update.

Hopefully, we helped you realize the importance of fresh prospect lists, and if you have any more questions – feel free to contact us.