logo
logo
Sign in

Data Decay and How It Is Ruining Your B2B Database

avatar
Jyoti Dhiman
Data Decay and How It Is Ruining Your B2B Database

We are currently living in a world that is driven by data. Although there are many challenges that businesses have to face while dealing with a large database and one such issue is related to data becoming outdated, which is called Data Decay.

Since your marketing data should be the jewel in the crown of your marketing strategy, it should be near to perfect. But this approach of data perfection can be hampered by data decay and since it happens naturally, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Although B2B affects each and every type of industry and business,  it is the worst-hit field. If your B2B database will be cluttered with data decay then it can easily rot your overall marketing campaigns and strategies.

What is Data Decay?

Data decay means the gradual loss of data quality in a system that includes important company information and contact information or other personal details. This is why the data becomes outdated and useless.

But by using B2B database providers, you can get rid of the issue of data decay.

Data Decays basically happen naturally as with time, people change their job, location, companies shut down and merge with each other - But there can be other reasons like duplicate content and incomplete fields. Data decay isn’t limited to only one or two types of business aspects as it hampers lead generation, marketing, finance, and even customer relationships.

Impact On B2B Marketing

The longer the data decay will remain in your database, the more damage it will do to your B2B business and will become difficult to deal with. You will be surprised to know that it will cost you only $1 if you will verify the data when it is entered and it will take you around $10 to trim it out later but if you will do nothing about it then it can cost you more than $100.

Data decay impacts email campaign and degrade the sales team activity to communicate with a prospect. It makes a big impact on B2B marketing since the quality and validity of the database used by the marketing team matters a lot. This is why most of the B2B firms are taking the help of B2B database providers.

Tips for clean data

Conduct data verification before it becomes a part of your database

Prevention is always better than cure and as stated above, dealing with dirty data after it becomes a part of your database will cost you $9/data more and if you will look at the overall cost then it can easily burn a hole in your pocket. You will need to conduct live, real-time verification as you receive the data and you can also choose those B2B database providers who offer only cleaned and verified data that is updated.

Centralize contact data hygiene

This is surely one of the best approaches for getting rid of dirty data. When you will centralize contact data hygiene then it will become easier for you to publish the clean data back to the system and application that uses the data.

Quality check

You should conduct a periodic quality check on your marketing data for

  • Duplicates- Duplicate data is one of the main reasons for data decay and there are chances that similar customer details have been entered with minor changes in the sheet.
  • Field completion- You will also need to check your B2B marketing data for field completion as incomplete data is also a part of dirty data.
  • Validity- Are you sure that the data you are using is valid? For example, are all the emails having @ symbol or not?

Use updated data

Never make the mistake of purchasing a large database from B2B intent data providers in one go because you will never be able to use the whole data set altogether and with time, the remaining dataset will become outdated and a part of the data decay. This is why you will always need to use updated data and avoid purchasing data in bulk. You should also ask your B2B intent data providers, how often they update their data?

Data decay is surely noxious for your B2B lead gen and all other aspects of marketing. It doesn’t matter how good your email content is and how good your product or services are, if it will not reach the right people because of data decay, then it will be of no use to you. Choose good B2B intent data providers, and make sure that they offer validated, updated, and useful databases to your company.

collect
0
avatar
Jyoti Dhiman
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more