What Are the Benefits of HubSpot Data Cleansing?

You pull some data from your HubSpot CRM or Salesforce marketing and sales database only to find that it is rife with errors. Some names are capitalized, some are not. Phone numbers are stored in a dozen different formats. Addresses are all over the place — some include the state and zip code information in the street address field, while others have them separate. Worse, your database is filled with duplicate records.

You can’t depend on a database with so many errors to deliver marketing materials to your prospects and customers. Not only will you fail to reach many of the people listed in your database, but you risk sending the same materials to the same person two, three, or even four times.

For your own peace of mind (and the reputation of your company) you need to make sure that the data is cleaned before using it in your marketing campaigns.

But, the thought of opening up an Excel sheet with thousands of records and using VLOOKUP and other formulas and by-hand editing to clean your data sounds daunting. Trying to edit all of your data by hand directly in HubSpot sounds even worse.

HubSpot data cleansing by hand just isn’t realistic — it would take you weeks to clean every record. By then, you’ll have hundreds of new records added to the database that have their own consistency and cleanliness issues.

What Is Data Cleaning?

Data cleaning is the process of preparing data for usage or analysis by removing or editing data that is incorrect, incomplete, duplicate, or irrelevant. HubSpot Data with these issues is not helpful. In fact, it is unhelpful and could potentially spoil the outcome of your marketing campaigns if used without proper data cleaning processes first.

Data cleaning is more than just erasing broken or outdated records. It’s about creating consistency throughout your HubSpot CRM contact database and giving you confidence in the data that you are using. Some of the tasks that are involved in a full data cleaning process include:

• Removing bad data
• Fixing spelling and syntax errors
• Standardizing formatting across records
• Filling empty fields
• Identifying and merging or deleting duplicate data

Ultimately, data cleaning strives to create a few specific key traits in any dataset. Those traits include:

• Validity. Validity refers to the constraints that determine what data is valid in your database and what data is invalid. This can refer to the data types stored within a field, formatting constraints, or any specific criteria that is required for the data to be recognized as “valid” and stored in the database.
• Accuracy. You need your data to be accurate for estimates, projections, and peace of mind when delivering materials to prospects and customers.
• Completeness. Records with critical empty fields can be a problem and lead to errors in your messaging.
• Uniformity. Data in a field should follow a consistent structure and format so that the data can be integrated into campaigns and used.

Those are just a few of the many different tasks that encompass HubSpot data cleaning. Insycle allows you to handle all of these tasks for your most important marketing and sales platforms, including HubSpot, Intercom, and Salesforce. Insycle is able to automatically detect common data errors and edit your database in bulk, while still giving you a complete view of the changes that will be made through previews.

Even better — many of the most critical data cleaning tasks can be completely automated through Insycle and set to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Benefits of HubSpot CRM Data Cleansing

To appreciate the importance of data cleaning when it comes to your vital marketing, sales, and customer databases, you have to have an understanding of the benefits that come from it. Keeping your HubSpot, Salesforce, or Intercom databases clean will help your company in a variety of ways and reverberate throughout departments.

Some of the benefits that you’ll enjoy from embracing an effective data cleaning policy include:

Better Understanding of Your Customers

The effectiveness of your HubSpot marketing programs rely almost entirely on your ability to understand and speak to the concerns, needs, and pain points of your customers. Incomplete or incorrect data gives you an incomplete or incorrect understanding of your customers.

When you have confidence in your data, that confidence will creep its way into every interaction that you have with your customers. Marketing emails, sales conversations, and customer success initiatives will all directly benefit from a clean and reliable dataset. You’ll improve the way you interact with customers when they are still prospects, as they become customers, and once they have been customers for some time.

What could be more important than that?

Improved Campaign Segmentation & Personalization

Source: EmailMonday

When you have confidence in the accuracy and consistency of your data, you can truly embrace segmentation and personalization. If you’re investing in HubSpot, you definitely want to take advantage of those features. A recent study from MailChimp found that email marketing campaigns that used segmentation enjoyed opens that were:

• Opens were 14.31% higher than non-segmented campaigns
• Clicks were 100.95% higher than non-segmented campaigns
• Unsubscriptions were 9.37% lower than non-segmented campaigns

But you have to have a lot of faith in your data to enact deep segmentation within your HubSpot marketing campaigns. Segmentation delivers specificity. You can speak specifically to your prospects using where they are from, actions they’ve taken in interacting with your company, or other demographic data to deliver messages that sound as if they were written specifically for them.

If you don’t have confidence that your data is accurate and consistent, you could end up speaking very specifically to prospects only to find that you’ve harmed your reputation with them by focusing on the wrong things. Accurate data leads to better decisions when it comes to segmentation and personalization.

Better Relationships with Customers

Better data means fewer mistakes in your marketing and advertising campaigns. You’ll call fewer customers by the wrong name. You’ll more accurately represent the interactions that your brand has had with the customer. You’ll be less likely to send the same customer the same message more than once.

Inconsistent data leads to inconsistent communications and poor experiences for your customers. That is true across the board. How do you improve your inbound marketing and outbound campaigns if inconsistent data means that you can't rely on anything that you have in your database? For instance, job titles can appear one of a number of ways. A CEO might have their job titles listed as "CEO," "C.E.O.," or "Chief Executive Officer." But it's all the same job title. Still, some of them might be missed when you go to segment your lists. 

Customers like when brands know and understand them. 78% of consumers will only engage with offers that have been personalized to their previous engagements with the brand. 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name and recommends options based on past purchases.

Accurate HubSpot and Salesforce data makes for accurate conversations, which help you to build genuinely positive relationships with customers over time.

Better customer service means better relationships. And great relationships come from understanding. That impacts every touchpoint with customers, including marketing and customer service. With HubSpot, you can attract visitors using inbound marketing, collect their data, and use that data to nurture and build relationships over time.

Reduce Data Duplication

Duplicate HubSpot data is a serious problem. It makes reporting difficult and can skew your numbers. It can cause misinformed projections and estimates. In your marketing databases, it can cause you to send the same campaign to the same prospect multiple times. In sales teams, it can derail sales calls and force your teams to dig through your databases to find potential duplicates before engaging in any activity with the customer — and that costs time and productivity.

In some databases, duplicate data can reach levels as high as 20+ percent. Duplicate data is the most straight-forward data quality issue that most companies encounter when using HubSpot or Salesforce. It’s front-facing. Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams are forced to deal with the repercussions of duplicate data on a daily basis.

Deduplicating data is low-hanging fruit when it comes to HubSpot data cleansing and improving data quality. The problem is that most data quality solutions miss most of the duplicates in any given database. This is often because they are looking for exact duplicates, or are only looking for matching data in certain fields.

Insycle takes dealing with duplicate data to the next level. Using our smart duplicate detection system, you can quickly identify nearly all of the duplicate records in a given database. Or, you can provide the system with a specific field that you would like to use to find duplicates. Then you can merge the records to create a master record or delete low-quality duplicates.

The best part — Insycle allows you to put dealing with duplicate HubSpot data on auto-pilot! Our new duplicate automation features make it easy to set up automated duplicate checks and corrections on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can also preview the changes before they go live to make sure no critical CRM data is overwritten!

Reduce Budget Waste

Low-quality HubSpot CRM data causes a lot of waste in organizations. In fact, a recent study showed that bad data may cost companies in the United States as much as $3 trillion per year.

Source: idigdata

It’s easy to see how low-quality HubSpot data would affect marketing budgets. You end up sending campaigns to emails that bounce (which also affects the email reputation of your domain), prospects receiving the same campaign multiple times, or delivering messages with incorrect data that sours their perception of your company.

Data issues in your HubSpot CRM contact and company databases are a huge concern. When your sales reps don’t trust the data that they have in front of them, they won’t integrate it into their pitches and sales conversations. If they run into a lot of duplicate data they’ll be more likely to spend their time rummaging through records to make sure they have all of the information that they need.

Poor data wastes time and budgets for departments throughout your entire company. Committing to HubSpot data cleansing initiatives will help you to reduce budget waste and maximize your marketing spend.

Create Alignment Between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success

This is one of the big, common data challenges.

Often, your sales, marketing, and customer success teams are working from the same databases. Or at least, you want to make sure that they are working with the same information. Giving everyone a complete single customer view that shows them how a particular prospect or customer has engaged with your company at every step provides them with context that they can use to improve their work.

In many companies, there are disconnects between the data that their teams are using. This means that they are missing out on that important context that they can use to better speak to a customer’s individual needs.

Improve Decision-Making Processes

Data cleansing will help your team to improve your decision-making.

Better data, better decisions. Accurate and clean data that gives you confidence puts you in a position to make important decisions with confidence. When you’ve been burned by bad data in the past, you’ll be less likely to take a data-backed approach to the decisions that you make.

Regular data cleaning campaigns will help you to make the right decision at the right time.

Increase Productivity

How much time do you think your employees spend dealing with bad data? This question encompasses every action that they take. The time your marketing teams spends adding, editing, and amending data for accuracy. The time they spend responding to disgruntled prospects that received the wrong information. The time your sales reps spend sorting through records to find duplicates so that they can have a full view of your brand’s history with a specific prospect.

For most companies, the answer is “a lot.” Too much. Especially when there are solutions that can help you to clean data in a fraction of the time:

How Insycle Automates HubSpot Data Cleaning

Our goal at Insycle is to make automating data cleaning as easy as possible for HubSpot users.

With just a few clicks, our system allows you to:

• Merge duplicate records. Find duplicates by any field combination, then merge them in bulk using a ruleset that you define. Remedy your duplicate HubSpot contacts problem and keep your databases clean with regular automated maintenance.
• Cleanse data. Format names and phone numbers, standardize titles, addresses, and more. The fields and rules that you use to format and cleanse the data are completely up to you.
• Import records, or update existing records. Import new HubSpot data or update existing records in flexible and safe ways. You can preview all changes to your database before it goes live to ensure that it is mistake-free!
• Remove redundant data. Remove contacts that bounced, unsubscribed, or haven't engaged recently. Reduce budget waste and ensure your marketing budgets go farther!

Insycle is the ultimate tool for data cleansing when it comes to platforms like HubSpot, Intercom, Salesforce, Yext, Zendesk, and Marketo.

You don’t have to run these tasks every time you’d like to clean your data, either. You can schedule them to run automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Here’s an example of an automated task, set to run on Tuesday and Thursday of every week, that reformats phone numbers in your database to ensure data in that field is consistently formatted.

Insycle is a complete data maintenance and data cleaning solution that will help you to increase your productivity, reduce budget waste, and have more confidence in your data.