If the average company dug into their Hubspot database, most would quickly find many data quality errors. These errors have a negative impact on marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
Don’t worry. It’s not any fault of your own. Data errors are unavoidable as your HubSpot data grows.
Data errors come from many places. Customer input into forms. Human error during data input from your teams. Customers sharing false or incomplete data. Errors while importing or exporting data.
It can be difficult to keep up with. Companies that don’t have a solution in place for assuring HubSpot data quality can quickly find that the errors start to overwhelm them and eat into their marketing budgets.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the common HubSpot data quality issues. We’ll cover what they are, why they are so common, and then at the end we’ll show you how Insycle provides you with an automated solution for fixing these issues and keeping your HubSpot marketing data clean.
Let’s get started.
Duplicate HubSpot data. It’s the most common issue in any Hubspot CRM database — or any marketing database in general for that matter. It's a big problem too, because it creates embarassing mistakes in your marketing automation and workflow sequences.
Duplicate data refers to two or more records that share data with one another. A duplicate might be a complete carbon copy of another record, or a partial duplicate. Often, duplicates are detected by email address. But, an email address alone is not the only way to identify duplicates. Often, customers may use a personal email address in one record, and a business address in another.
Carbon copy duplicate contact records are often created by errors when importing or exporting the data. Sometimes data is accidentally fully duplicated during import. Sometimes a member of your team may upload data from two different sources, resulting in the same contact record appearing in your database twice.
Duplicate customer data drives waste in your marketing and sales budgets. It can cause embarrassment when your marketing or sales teams contact the same prospect twice. It eliminates a single customer view.
Duplicate data is a serious problem. While Hubspot comes with a tool for cleaning duplicates, often companies with larger databases will need a specialized solution for taking care of their duplicate HubSpot data.
Luckily, Insycle makes it easy to bulk merge records directly in your HubSpot database.
You can find duplicate contacts by any field — matching phone numbers, addresses, emails, or any field in your HubSpot database.
Then, Insycle allows you to choose a master record to merge the data into. You can bulk merge many records at one time, which is much faster than using HubSpot’s duplicate feature, which requires that you address each duplicate 1-by-1.
With Insycle, you can ensure that duplicate data is taken care of as soon as it is imported, rather than letting it affect your campaigns.
Even better — Insycle allows you to put HubSpot dedupe processes on autopilot. You can create a process for handling duplicate records and set it to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis:
Insycle can also help with HubSpot and Salesforce sync issues that arise from duplicates. Often, duplicate records will break the sync between the two platforms.
Using Insycle’s dedupe automation, you’ll still be able to check the changes made to your data before it goes live. Without duplicates in your database, you'll be able to run your marketing automation without worrying about contacting the same prospect twice.
Incomplete data is another common HubSpot data quality issue, and is a form of bad data that can cause many issues. How many of the contacts in your database are missing important information? Examples include phone numbers without area codes, addresses without states or zips, or customers without emails. Some customers may not have their last name listed.
Incomplete data can cause serious problems in your marketing campaigns. First, you may have errors in your messaging as you try to pull data for personalization. You may segment HubSpot contacts incorrectly.
Incomplete data can be a difficult problem to solve. If you are missing vital data for your HubSpot contacts, in some cases, that means that you’ll have to collect the data using other means.
Using Insycle, identifying records with missing data is simple.
In the “Data Validation” screen, you simply select the record that you would like to search for (Phone Number), and then tell Insycle to find fields where the phone number does not exist.
Then, our system will display all records in your database that have a missing phone number, allowing you to manually fix issues:
Incomplete customer data in HubSpot makes it impossible to run marketing automation sequences confidently.
Inconsistent formatting is an ongoing problem in most HubSpot databases and fixing these issues is a vital piece of the data cleansing puzzle.
Dates can be formatted in many different ways:
The same can be said for phone number formatting:
Or job titles:
See what I mean? The same can be said for addresses and other important HubSpot data fields as well, along with any company record. These issues are mostly driven by human error and a lack of effective validity requirements on input forms. When you have many people (customers and team members) entering important data, you can’t avoid the fact that people use different formats in their personal lives and will inevitably use different formats in your own databases.
HubSpot doesn’t offer any features to deal with data formatting issues. Companies with larger databases have two options — either deal with incorrect formats (and cost themselves money in the process), or invest in an outside solution that can detect and automatically fix common formatting issues like these.
Insycle allows you to create advanced automated processes for fixing your formatting in specific fields.
Let’s start with an example — first names in your HubSpot records.
There are likely to be all sorts of errors in your first names field. Some might be capitalized. Some might have Mr. or Mrs. appended to it.
Using Insycle, you can automatically clean your database. In this example, we have created a process to fix the formatting of first names. This will remove any leading or trailing spaces in the fields, remove “Mr.” or “Mrs.” from the field, remove any first names fields with numbers, and ensure that proper capitalization is used.
Like the duplicate data feature we talked about earlier, once you create a process in our system you can set it up to run automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. And you can do this with any field in your HubSpot CRM database, including addresses, phone numbers, and job titles.
With Insycle, you can make ensuring that all of your HubSpot data is perfectly formatted. Fixing the formatting of records is an important step in the data cleansing process.
Then we have inaccurate data. This is a bit of a tougher problem to solve, because bad data often can't be spotted with an Excel formula. Inaccurate data can come from many different sources and is a serious issue when it comes to launching marketing automation campaigns. No one wants to be called the wrong name, or have the wrong personalization info inserted into their communications.
A customer might purposefully share inaccurate data with you. Maybe they want to sign up for a free trial, but don’t want to receive marketing emails. Maybe they provide a false phone number because they don’t want to have to take a phone call. Maybe they just value their privacy and don’t like providing their address. Any reason, really.
But inaccurate data can also come from human input error. Humans input bad data ll the time. Your team or customers might mis-type when entering information. When human input is a requirement, there will always be some inaccurate data in your HubSpot databases.
Using Insycle, you can identify many of the records in your database with inaccurate data. For instance, you could use our system to find HubSpot contact names that include numbers, improperly formatted addresses, or phone numbers with an incorrect number of digits.
All sorts of weird things can happen when you move data from one platform to another. Data is duplicated. Some data might be corrupted. Some data may disappear. Your exports and imports are only as reliable as the platform itself.
Depending on the HubSpot import, there might be multiple different types of import errors. Trying to go through your HubSpot contact and company record data by hand is too time-consuming to be realistic for larger companies.
Insycle can help you to spot and fix common data import problems. Duplicate records can be removed before they ever play a role in your marketing campaigns. Missing data can be identified. Corrupted data can be identified and removed from your database.
Insycle can help you to identify and fix HubSpot records with all of the most common HubSpot data quality issues and get your data management under control. Insycle is a complete HubSpot data management solution that allows you to fix and automate the most common data quality fixes, freeing up your marketing, sales, and customer service teams' time to focus on other aspects of your business.
Learn more about ways to automate your data maintenance and the CRM Data Health Assessment.