How bad does someone’s data have to be before they realise that bad data just doesn’t work. Working with bad data gets bad results.
You try and get away with it until it no longer works for you. You realise you cannot carry on. With no choice, you see that good data is the only way to be.
As with so many things in life only when things go wrong do you change your attitude towards something…I’ve been there many times myself…it’s only human.
So, let’s learn this lesson a little earlier, before things go really bad for your data.
To make it absolutely clear, we’re going to use some mathematics to show good data beating bad data every time.
(This is not a mathematical proof in the true sense of the word, but the numbers clearly show, good data wins, always.)
Let’s consider an email campaign.
Assume we have 1,000 contacts in our CRM system that we wish to promote one of our products to.
(These calculations can equally apply to direct mailing campaigns, telesales, out-bound LinkedIn campaigns, in fact most marketing campaigns.)
We are going to consider the good data scenario as having all the correct emails. For the bad data scenario, we’re assuming we have emails for 82% of the data and a further 2% of the emails are invalid.
You performed the marketing campaigns before achieving a return of 2% conversion to sales with an average order value of £500.00
Now let’s dive into the maths:
So, good data returns £10,000 in sales and bad data £8,000 in sales; that’s £2,000 more or 25% better than the bad data.
That is staggering!
Imagine you can increase your sales by 25% just by fixing your data, why wouldn’t you.
If your data is worse than this example, then the percentage uplift is greater. The worse your data, the more you will return once the data is fixed. If you change the above calculation from 20% bad emails, to 40%, to 60% and 80%, the increase in sales by fixing your data is exponential:
What this is saying is, the worse your data is right now the more you are losing in sales.
So, if you have bad data, fix it now!
Don’t do what we all do, that’s wait until it gets bad.
Every time you accept bad data in a marketing campaign you are losing sales.
There are so many factors that make up a good marketing campaign, from positioning, messaging to targeting, etc. These things can be argued to be intangible and require testing and feedback to make precise. But the one thing that is in your control and far more manageable is the quality of your data.