B2B Data Decay: Why Your Outdated CRM Data Is Costing You Money (And How To Fix It)

Maintaining a clean and current CRM database is crucial for organizations to stay competitive and operate efficiently. Over time, CRM databases can become cluttered with outdated records. Those records may have contained valuable information originally, but data decays over time. As it does, it will erode your ability to provide positive, personalized customer experiences.

Contacts might move jobs, resulting in a new company, email address, and phone number. This will render all existing data on that individual inaccurate, which means they may not even be recognized as the same person when the new information is entered. You’ll end up with duplicate contact records that contain inconsistent data.

These issues will converge to negatively impact decision-making, email deliverability and reputation, resource allocation, brand reputation, and customer experiences. In the end, you won’t be able to leverage your CRM to its full potential, which will hinder growth and overall performance.

To address this issue, companies need to adopt a proactive approach to identifying outdated, decayed records and then either purging them or enriching them to bring them up to date.

How Outdated CRM Data Is Costing Your Company Money

Outdated CRM data can lead to a number of problems that will have a significant impact on your bottom line. These include:

• email deliverability and reputation problems
• inaccurate reporting
• harmed brand reputation
• personalization errors
• wasted budget and resources

Let’s look at each of these issues arising from decayed B2B data.

Harmed Email Deliverability and Reputation

One of the most immediate consequences of outdated data is the negative effect on email deliverability. When a company's CRM database contains outdated or invalid email addresses, it increases the likelihood of bounced emails and lowers the overall deliverability rate for the company’s entire list of subscribers. This wastes marketing resources on undeliverable messages and can also harm the sender reputation, resulting in future emails being marked as spam or blocked entirely.

The crucial factors affecting your email sender reputation consist of:

• Open rate: This refers to the proportion of emails opened by your recipients. A low open rate may indicate that your emails are not engaging enough or are being sent too frequently.
• Unsubscribe rate: This metric represents the percentage of users who opt out of your mailing list after receiving your emails. Elevated unsubscribe rates can signify that you are perceived as a low-quality sender.
• Hard bounce rates: An increased hard bounce rate might indicate that you are sending emails to poor-quality lists or addresses that have not given consent to receive your messages.

Outdated data is certain to have a negative impact on your email sender reputation if steps are not taken to remove those older records from your subscriber lists.

Inaccurate Reporting

Another critical issue stemming from outdated CRM data is inaccurate reporting, which can lead to poor decision-making. Companies rely on accurate data to make informed decisions about sales strategies, marketing campaigns, and customer targeting.

For example, if 20% of your contact records are more than two years old and have not received updates recently, there is a good chance that a large percentage of those records are out of date and inaccurate. However, those records are still being included in your reporting, skewing the results. Many of those contacts may not even work for the company that is listed in their contact record, and as a result, all other information that you have on them may be inaccurate as well.

When CRM data is outdated or unreliable, it skews the insights generated from the data, leading to ill-advised decisions that can negatively affect the company's growth and profitability.

Harmed Brand Reputation

Outdated CRM data can also damage a company's brand reputation.

Customers expect personalized and relevant interactions with businesses. But when customer data is outdated or incorrect, it can lead to awkward or inappropriate interactions, such as addressing a customer using the wrong company name or sending irrelevant marketing materials. These mistakes can frustrate customers, erode trust, and ultimately harm the company's reputation and customer retention rates.

Personalization Errors

Errant personalization is another consequence of outdated CRM data. Personalization plays a vital role in modern marketing strategies. It allows companies to tailor their messaging and offers based on individual customer preferences and behaviors. According to a survey from Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.

But personalization issues can have a big impact on your campaigns.

For example, if you had a contact that was outdated and listed as working for Nike in Corvalis, Oregon, you would send them completely different materials than if they worked for Disney in Los Angeles, California. Contact records that are several years old may be wholly out of date, leading to the prospect receiving the wrong information, which of course impacts their view of your brand.

When CRM data is outdated or incomplete, it can lead to misguided personalization efforts that miss the mark, alienate customers, and fail to drive engagement or conversions.

Wasted Budget and Resources

Lastly, outdated CRM data can result in wasted budget and resources. Companies invest a significant amount of time and money in their CRM systems, sales, and marketing efforts. When the data driving these initiatives is outdated or incorrect, it leads to inefficiencies and wasted investments that could have been better allocated elsewhere. By cleaning and maintaining up-to-date CRM data, companies can optimize their resource utilization, improve their return on investment, and ultimately save money.

Steps To Take To Clean an Outdated CRM

It’s clear that businesses should prioritize cleaning an outdated CRM database to avoid the problems we just discussed, but it can seem like a daunting project. A systematic approach, however, can help companies effectively improve the quality of their data and enhance the performance of their CRM system. Here are the essential steps to take when cleaning an outdated CRM:

1. Identify and remove inactive contacts: Inactive contacts can clutter your CRM and cause you to waste valuable resources on unproductive outreach and marketing efforts. Analyze your contact list to identify those who have not engaged with your business for an extended period, and remove or archive them accordingly.
2. Identify and merge duplicates: Duplicate records take up valuable storage space and create confusion and inconsistencies within the CRM system. Use CRM tools or third-party software to identify and merge duplicate records, ensuring that all relevant data is consolidated under a single, accurate entry.
3. Identify and remove useless records: Many outdated records may no longer be relevant or useful to your business. Review your CRM data and remove any records that no longer serve a purpose and are simply taking up space.
4. Update and enrich quality records: For older or outdated records that still provide value, ensure that they are accurate and up to date by enriching them with new information and replacing inaccurate field data. For some fields, you may need a data enrichment service. For others, you can enrich certain fields using existing CRM data.
5. Standardize data in critical fields: Consistent data formatting is crucial for segmenting, personalization, and reporting. Establish standards and ensure that all records adhere to these guidelines, making it easier to analyze, search, and segment your data.
6. Segment and categorize: Organize your CRM data into meaningful segments and categories based on factors such as customer demographics, purchase history, or engagement patterns. This will make it easier to identify low-value, outdated records.
7. Automate data cleaning processes: Regular data maintenance is essential for keeping your CRM database clean and up-to-date. Implement automated data cleaning processes—such as scheduled deduplication, data validation, and enrichment tasks—to minimize the risk of outdated or inaccurate data accumulating in your CRM.
8. Train your team on data standards: A well-maintained CRM database requires the commitment and participation of your entire team. Train your employees on data entry standards and best practices to ensure that they are contributing accurate, consistent, and high-quality data to your CRM system.

By following these steps, you can effectively clean and maintain your outdated CRM, removing what makes sense and keeping records that still provide value to your business.

Insycle can help companies in all eight of the above tasks. Let’s take a look at how:

How Insycle Can Help You Clean Up an Outdated CRM

Insycle is a CRM data management solution that can help companies deal with outdated and decayed data in their CRM in a variety of ways.

Removing Inactive and Outdated Records

Insycle makes it simple to slice and dice your data any way you’d like to remove records and declutter your CRM. For example, using Insycle’s Bulk Operations module, you could filter your database down to all records that were updated prior to a specific date.

This would allow you to view all records that haven’t received updates recently. Then, you could identify records that haven’t been modified in the last six months or one year, which is a strong indicator that the record may be outdated.

Once you have identified outdated records that are no longer relevant, Insycle makes it easy to purge them from your database by simply selecting them on the record viewer and running the deletion template. You can view data from any field to help with your analysis before deleting.

And you can do this for any field in your database. For example, you could filter for contacts that have had hard-bounced emails, another indicator that a record may be outdated or low-value and qualified for purging.

You could also filter by the Last Activity Date field, or a similar field in your CRM, which shows the last time that a contact or company had recorded activity, either on their own accord or via manual updates from your own team.

However, not all outdated records need to be purged. In some situations, a record may be useful to you, but still needs to be updated and enriched, rather than purged. Insycle allows you to infer the correct data in many fields based on data that you have already collected and enrich them. You may need to use a data enrichment service for some other fields, however.

Identifying and Merging Duplicates

Insycle also offers unparalleled duplicate detection and merging capabilities. In any CRM with lots of outdated records, duplicate data is going to be a problem. If you haven’t been maintaining your database well, including identifying and merging duplicate records based on a  range of matching criteria, you can be sure that you have higher than normal duplication rates.

Using Insycle’s Customer Data Health Assessment, you can automatically track duplicates across multiple record types, using a range of matching criteria.

Then, you can also build your own custom templates. With Insycle, you can use any field in your CRM database as a matching field, along with advanced controls for how the matching field is evaluated, such as exact matching, similar matching, or ignoring specific aspects of the field.

Then, you have complete control over the resulting master record after the merge. You can set rules, which are evaluated in order, for determining what record will be chosen as the master record post-merge. In the example below, the record that has clicked the most marketing emails will be chosen. If there is a tie or all merged records in the group do not meet the top rule, Insycle will then move on to the next one. This is ideal for choosing a master record that is not outdated and has the most up-to-date information.

For advanced duplicate merges, you can even set rules for determining how data is retained on a field-by-field basis.

This puts you in the pilot seat for how duplicates are identified and merged in your CRM, as well as how data is retained post-merge.

Identifying and Purging Low-Quality Records in Your CRM

Insycle’s Customer Data Health Assessment, which is available with every Insycle plan, tracks numerous metrics that can help companies identify outdated and low-quality records.

These metrics are organized into numerous categories. One of these categories is invalid data, which helps companies spot things like invalid zip codes, free email addresses, spam email addresses, invalid phone numbers, and other issues that can be a sign that a record is inaccurate or low-value.

Another Health Assessment category that would be relevant for dealing with outdated and low-quality records is the low-quality data category, which tracks things like contacts with do-not-reply emails, role-based emails (like admin@site.com or sales@site.com), or contacts that have been inactive for more than six months and have not opened any emails from your company during that time.

Each of these separate identified issues is a template, that you can view to look at the underlying records that meet the criteria. While low-quality data is not always outdated, it can be a good indicator that the record has not been updated for some time.

Enriching Fields Using Already-Collected Information

Using Insycle, you can enrich data in some fields based on data in other fields. A great example of this comes from the Postal Code and State/Region fields. If you have collected the zip code but do not have a U.S. state for that record, Insycle can automatically enrich that field based on the zip code. This function is built directly into Insycle.

Another example of using Insycle for enrichment comes from the Email field. Using Insycle, you can extract the first and last name from emails that are formatted like “firstname.lastname@gmail.com.” This is helpful for personalization and ensures that you have the correct contact names on file.

Standardizing Data

Outdated data is often not standardized. Since those records were created, you’ve probably had standards changed. Insycle can help you identify records that are not following current standards, and quickly update them.

First, you can review all of the fields in your database and learn more about those fields, including the type of field, the number of unique values that it contains, and the total records with empty values for that field. Additionally, you can download a CSV report of all of the fields in your CRM database.

Then, you can dig down into the variations that are contained within each field.

And by selecting a variation bucket, you can then analyze the individual records in that bucket for more context.

Then, you can select the records individually, and update the data within that field to your current standard.

Segmenting, Categorizing, and Reporting

Insycle makes it incredibly simple to quickly slice and dice CRM data in advanced ways for segmentation, categorization, and reporting. You can use any combination of fields to segment your data for analysis and reporting.

Then, you can export these segments and share them with colleagues automatically through email.

Automating Outdated Data Cleanups

Insycle templates can be automated to run on a set schedule. So once you have a template that automatically identifies outdated or low-quality data using specific rules, you can set it to run regularly to keep your database free from clutter.

Internal Training

Then, you can bundle these templates into Recipes, which are series of templates that can be executed in order. This is excellent for internal training, allowing your teams to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening behind the scenes to clean, standardize, and declutter your CRM database.

Insycle: Your Essential CRM Data Management Toolkit

Insycle offers a powerful and user-friendly platform designed to help companies clean up outdated data, ensuring accurate and consistent information across their CRM systems. By automating many of the data cleaning steps discussed in this article, Insycle helps businesses save time and resources while maximizing the value of their data.

Insycle goes beyond basic CRM data cleaning by providing a complete CRM data management solution. Often, CRM data issues are blind spots that inhibit execution for companies. With its comprehensive suite of tools, Insycle allows businesses to maintain data integrity, automate data cleaning processes, and enforce data standards across their entire organization. Then companies can optimize their CRM systems to drive better decision-making, improve customer experiences, and enhance overall business performance.

Don't let outdated CRM data hold your business back. Take control of your CRM data and unlock its full potential with Insycle. Learn more about how Insycle can transform your CRM data management processes and help you deal with outdated CRM data.