Have you ever dug through your marketing campaigns to find that you sent the same promotion to the same customer multiple times? This is just one of the many examples of problems that duplicate data in your HubSpot, Salesforce, or Intercom account can cause.Duplicate data is a serious problem for companies of any size. A study by Experian showed that 94% of organizations suspect that their customer data might be inaccurate. If those companies have a decent number of records in their database, they can be certain that their data is not 100% accurate.
However, most companies vastly underestimate how big of a problem duplicate data actually is. Experts have found that duplication rates as high as 10%-30% are not uncommon when a company has no initiatives in place to ensure the quality of their data. One study found that as many as 40% of lead records had bad data.
An excellent example of the hidden impact of duplicate data comes from Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. The company worked with a third-party firm to clean up a database that showed a staggering amount of duplicate data — 22%. After instituting best practices and investing in solutions to help them clean up their databases, the company was able to reduce their duplicate data rates down to 0.2%.
Those HubSpot and Salesforce duplicates have measurable costs for those companies, but the overall impact of dealing with that data runs much deeper than overspending on a marketing campaign.
Your employees spend more time trying to understand, edit, and work around that duplicate data. Your sales teams may use inaccurate information that isn’t up to date during sales calls. Your broader organizational decisions are being made using data that may be sending false signals that influence your decisions.
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One of the reasons why many companies underestimate the impact that duplicate data has on their organization is because they don’t fully understand what duplicate data actually is. Yes, there is the obvious example of duplicate data, where an exact copy of a record has been made within your marketing database.
Most duplicate data doesn’t come in the form of a carbon copy of an entire record. If it does, typically one of the two carbon copies will continue to be edited and added to by your marketing and sales teams, making one more up to date than the other. Still, the older record still exists and can confuse your teams and cause errors.
The most common form of duplicate data in a HubSpot or Salesforce account is a partial duplicate. This is a record that contains some but not all of the data from another record. They may contain the same name, phone number, address, and other records but not all of the available information about a specific lead. These entries often occur from errors importing or moving data, human error during input, or customers and lead filling out forms more than once. Most of the duplicates in a given database will be partial duplicates.
Now let’s dive into the real-world examples of how duplicate data impacts your marketing and sales teams and the initiatives that they launch.
Duplicate HubSpot data is especially impactful for marketing teams. Marketing teams rely on their databases for nearly everything that they do. With personalization playing such a key role in modern digital marketing campaigns, it is so important that your marketing teams have confidence that their CRM data is up to date and accurate.
Companies that operate their marketing teams without reliable data quality assurance initiatives will find that duplicate data impacts their marketing teams in a number of ways:
Duplicate HubSpot data directly impacts your marketing budget. In CRM databases like HubSpot or Salesforce with high levels of duplicate data, you may be wasting 10%-20% of your overall budget on sending multiple messages to the same person. Not only is this a direct waste of your budget but it also impacts the perception of your brand with leads and customers, who may receive mixed signals from your marketing campaigns.
Poor marketing data costs businesses $611 billion per year. That doesn’t even take into account the costs associated with dealing with that data. To avoid sending multiple messages to the same person and ensure that your campaigns are using data from the right records, marketing employees spend a lot of time sifting through and editing data by-hand, often using Microsoft Excel, which can be time-consuming and cumbersome.
While investing in a solution like Insycle to deal with duplicate data does require an upfront investment, it saves your marketing operations teams money in the long run by reducing campaign size, database size, and saving your team the time of dealing with duplicate data in their campaigns.
Lost productivity may be the most impactful issue caused by duplicate data in marketing teams. To protect the reputation of the brand, your marketing team is forced to sift through data, use complicated Excel formulas, and edit records by hand that they aren’t otherwise able to pinpoint with those formulas.
Combing through a HubSpot database with thousands of records to find duplicates can take full days or weeks when done by hand. That’s a whole lot of time that your teams could have spent being more productive. Even then, fixing duplicate data by hand means that your database will never be fully clean. Some records will be missed.
Today 67% of businesses rely on CRM data to target and segment customers. Personalization is a key component of modern digital marketing campaigns. 78% of consumers will only engage with offers that are personalized to their previous engagements with a brand. 77% of consumers have paid more for a service or product that offers a personalized experience. Trying to build out personalization in HubSpot with low-reliability data leads to less personalization.
But, to do personalization effectively, you need to ensure that you have accurate data. You don’t want to deliver personalized messages that are inaccurate or don’t actually apply to them. Clean data is critical for an effective, personalized experience for customers.
When a single customer’s history with your company is split up among two or three different records, it can be nearly impossible to tailor your marketing messages to their specific stage in the buying cycle.
Knowing when they have interacted with your customer service teams, what content they have engaged with on your website, and what information they have requested through forms are all critical components of any fleshed-out marketing automation strategy. That lack of a single view for each customer affects everyone in your company that accesses those records including employees in your marketing, sales, customer service, and customer success departments.
When your customers and prospects receive multiple messages or messages that utilize inaccurate or outdated data, their perception of your brand is affected. Customers love automation. They love the personalization and deeper understanding of their ads that data collection can bring to the table.
But they don’t love it when that data leads to the wrong conclusions. No one enjoys feeling like they are speaking to a brick wall or receiving automated messages from a bot and not a real person. Inaccurate data makes consumers feel that way.
It’s not limited to when a prospect first begins to interact with your company, either. Duplicate data impacts their interactions with your brand over time. Paying customers that receive multiple or inaccurate messages can affect their opinion of your brand all the same, increasing churn and reducing customer loyalty.
Ultimately a lack of confidence in your data leads to a lack of effectiveness in your marketing campaigns. When you can’t trust your data, your marketing teams are less likely to inject personalization into campaigns. Customer data will play a smaller role in every campaign. As companies look for new and creative ways to inject personal data into their messaging, a lack of willingness to go the extra mile can set you behind the competition.
Duplicate data also has a huge impact on sales teams. Sales teams rely heavily on up to date and accurate customer data to shape conversations and inform their approach with specific prospects.
Inaccurate, outdated, and duplicate customer data not only causes your sales team to make errors, but they also have to waste their time sifting through databases to find the correct records before each call. 37% of business email addresses change annually and it’s important that businesses are able to verify and refresh data that could change over time. Duplicate data creates a lack of confidence in the data among sales teams in the same way that it does marketing teams.
A lack of a single customer view is an absolute productivity killer for sales reps. Your sales reps don’t want to go into a sales call feeling like they don’t have the full picture. No one wants to look or feel unprepared.
If they know that HubSpot duplicate contacts are a common issue within your CRM, they will look for multiple records before engaging with a prospect. That means that in some cases, they are spending double (or more) the time preparing to engage with a prospect. That means that they are interacting with fewer prospects and therefore are closing fewer deals.
Your sales teams require a single customer view and confidence in your data to effectively handle their job duties and work productively. A lack of a single customer view will impact every prospect that they engage with.
Having multiple duplicate prospect and customer records means that they may inadvertently be contacted multiple times by your sales team unless the duplicate data is identified first. This reflects poorly on your company, can embarrass sales reps, and ultimately harms your brand’s reputation.
This goes back to the importance of having a single customer view. Knowing when your prospects were contacted, what was discussed when they were contacted, and what the next steps are are critical for creating a seamless and convincing experience for prospects.
To contact them multiple times without the right context for those interactions could sabotage your sales efforts and result in lost opportunities that can be difficult to measure.
The sales issues with HubSpot duplicate contacts aren’t limited to contacting customers multiple times. Having inaccurate data on hand also negatively impacts their ability to persuade and develop relationships with sales reps.
If a prospect knows that they have provided more information that the sales rep is able to reference, they’ll feel frustrated and their opinion of your brand will erode over time.
Like your marketing team, your sales reps don’t want to make these needless mistakes on sales calls. They too have a reputation that they would like to protect and relationships that they need to nurture.
For that reason, having too many duplicate records in your database may cause your sales team to start checking for duplicates in your Salesforce database between interactions with prospects. They also may try to edit and resolve data issues themselves by hand, which can lead to more input errors and future productivity issues for whoever deals with those records down the road.
Keeping your sales teams happy is important. Many sales positions rely on the rep’s ability to close the sale in order to earn commission and grow their earnings. If they feel like they are missing out on opportunities due to poor data quality, their satisfaction in their position will fall over time. It’s not their job to fix your Salesforce data.
In sales positions, their ability to prosper often depends on the tools that they’ve been given. High-quality sales materials and reliable data can be the difference between a job that lacks satisfaction and a fulfilling job that puts them in a position to succeed on a personal level. Quality prospect and customer data is perhaps the best tool that you can give your sales teams.
Using Insycle takes all of the hard work out of dealing with HubSpot duplicate contacts. The system allows you to identify and merge duplicate companies and contacts.
Using Insycle, you can automatically detect duplicate records for any field in your database. Once identified, you can then delete and merge the duplicate records simply through the system.
By simply clicking the “Merge” button, all of the relevant fields are re-assigned to your chosen master record. The system allows you to pick which value you retain for each field, so duplicate data can be mixed and match to ensure that your entry is accurate and up to date. This saves marketing teams all of the time associated with sifting through large databases.
Additionally, you can use our “Merge in Bulk” feature to merge thousands of duplicates with a single click. Using that feature, you can preview the changes that will be made to your data before it runs, ensuring that no critical data is being overwritten or improperly changed. With the click of a button you can free your database from duplicates — but only when you have confidence that it is being completed correctly!
Using Insycle, you could cleanse your data and remove nearly all of your duplicate data with just a few mouse clicks.
But, the system is even more flexible. It also offers smart partial matching, ensuring that you catch duplicate records that aren’t an exact match in the database. For instance, if you had two customer records for the same customer that features two different email addresses like this:
Most systems would miss these duplicate entries and you’d be well on your way to emailing John twice everytime that you send something out, souring his opinion of your company and potentially losing a sale. Insycle’s partial match features would catch this duplicate.
But Insycle is more than just ad-hoc HubSpot data cleaning. It delivers data automation that will automatically search through your database, find HubSpot duplicate contacts, then merge them together on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Want a simple, effective solution for dealing with duplicate data that will save you time, money, and headaches?
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