According to a New York Times report, 50 to 80% of data scientists spend a majority of their time combining through irrelevant data and arranging chaotic data, before it can be used by the business organizations. When it comes to data, a lot of things can go wrong, be it the arrangement, spellings, formatting, duplication, and so on. To perform data analytics efficiently, it is crucial to use data cleansing and appending tools and techniques.
What Is Database Cleansing and Why Is It Important?
Database cleaning or scrubbing is the process of identifying erroneous or corrupt data from a given database, table, or dataset. It also includes removing the inaccurate, unfinished, unreliable or non-relevant data and restoring, replacing, or removing the crude data.
A lot of businesses depend on the big data for a lot of things, like:
- Creating precise customer profiles to engage with them in a more meaningful way
- Analyzing and scanning social media trends and newspaper reports
- Double-checking that their customer’s addresses are accurate
- Ensuring that accurate invoices are sent to the recipients
According to a data analytics market study published in 2017, 53% of companies from around the world have adopted Big Data, as opposed to 17% in 2015. Businesses across the globe are realizing the power of clean, accurate data to increase the fundamental value of their brand. For the unhindered and substantial growth of a business, it is crucial to make sure that the data in use is clean and authentic, which can be quite tough to pull. Why? Think about the innumerous hassles a business faces on a day to day basis, manual troubleshooting, shipments to the wrong address, processing errors, and incorrect invoice data.
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The customer data is almost always evolving due to a lot of factors (e.g. relocation) and needs to be updated in the database. That’s where the b2b data cleansing services come in. By data cleansing or scrubbing your data, you can reduce the operational costs dramatically and maximize your profits. In addition to that, here are the top reasons you need data appending and cleansing services. When was the last time you thought about performing a quality check on your customer data?
The quality of your decisions largely depends on the quality of information you possess. Whether you are analyzing or executing a decision, thorough data cleansing ensures that you are making effective decisions that will contribute to your success in the long run.
A prospect list with the most up-to-date and accurate data is like gold to any business that’s looking to acquire new customers. Imagine this: you have spent considerable resources in creating an email campaign but 20% of your emails aren’t even reaching your targets! Don’t believe it? According to the 2017 Deliverability Benchmark Report by Return Path, 1 in 5 commercial emails worldwide fails to reach the intended customers.
Why? Poor list quality has been cited as one of the top reasons. If your customer data includes inactive or wrong email addresses that will happen. A database cleansing can be the difference between an ineffective and successful marketing campaign.
How else can you make sure that your employees aren’t creating invalid vendor files in the system or contacting customers with outdated information? The benefits of Database cleansing ensure that all data is accurate and your staff is making the best use of their working hours. If an improved efficiency and productivity of your staff doesn’t convince you of the significance of the B2B data cleansing services, we don’t know what will.
According to this Hubspot study, you lose 25% of your database in one year due to data decay. There’s a lot more to data cleansing than fixing typos and looking for duplicates.
Gregg Thaler, the principal development officer at Marketo once famously said contact data ages like fish, not wine it gets worse as it gets older, not better. And we agree. Here are some of the steps that are included in the data cleaning process by a professional:
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- Getting rid of extra spaces
- Converting numbers stored as text into numbers
- Selecting and treating all blank cells
- Changing text to lower/upper/proper case
- Removing duplicate data
- Highlighting errors
- Spelling check
Trying to clean your data manually can be an overwhelming task. And while some software applications can scrub your data (Automated data cleansing), they can’t monitor or review the data for inconsistencies, only humans can do that at this point anyway; who knows what the technological advancement in the A.I. will bring in the future. Did you know that Only-B2B.com not only scrubs your customer data; we contact every lead to ensure that every bit of information you hold is accurate.
Vikas Bhatt is the Co-Founder of ONLY B2B, a premium B2B lead generation company that specializes in helping businesses achieve their growth objectives through targeted marketing & sales campaigns. With 10+ years of experience in the industry, Vikas has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today and has developed a unique approach to lead generation that has helped clients across a range of industries around the globe. As a thought leader in the B2B marketing community, ONLY B2B specializes in demand generation, content syndication, database services and more.