Out with the old and in with the new – now’s the time to think about deleting obviously bad data out of your system so you get better results in 2018! At RevEngine Marketing, we already did some purging last week which saw our average open rate increase 40%+ for this holiday series.

For the holidays, we are releasing a bite-sized, stocking-stuffer Marketo tip each day this week to make you a little more productive. Today, we talk about a quick win to purge some of your bad data.

Clean out Your Data Closet

Did you know that a bad record can cost as much as $100 to maintain?

Sirius Decisions estimates that between the tangible and perceived costs, organizations spend an average of $100 to maintain every record in their database – including the dirty ones. Even if you disagree with that figure and go conservative at $10 per record, 10,000 bad records costs $100,000. Doesn’t it make sense to get the delete key ready?

Data cleanup should done be in conjunction with a data retention policy. We call the process of creating the strategy and executing on it the Gold Nugget Data methodology.  This six-step best practice data retention policy methodology is quite literally like panning for gold; leads pass through different filters, slowly sifting out the dirt while leaving shiny nuggets of clean data remaining at the end.

Today, we’ll talk about one of those steps.

The Quick Hit – Records without Email Addresses

For this post, we’ll dive into the quick hit you can evaluate deploying before the new year (this is one of the six Gold Nugget methodologies mentioned above).

In your marketing automation platform, records without email addresses are virtually useless. You can’t email them, you can’t track their activities, and they increase the possibility for future duplicates because Marketo only de-dupes on email address. At this point, they’re most likely just taking up valuable space that could be used for viable records.

Start by:

Dumping people who don’t have an email address is one step that’s easy to adopt. As a first pass, focus on Salesforce Lead records. Contact records are more complex since they may have Opportunities associated with them. Check out the below screen shot for one way to accomplish in Marketo.

#realtalk: We saw one client upload 10k+ names to its database without email addresses, which spiked the database limit and triggered a letter from Marketo about the overage; however, once we identified records without email addresses, we were able to delete them to save space and money.

Then, over the long-term:

You’ll want develop a process with sales that prevents them from adding SFDC records without email addresses. You can also work with your SFDC admin and Marketo to set up a special filter that prevents empty email addresses from syncing to Marketo.

Wrapup

Bad data is bad news. Not only does it clog your database and hike up your costs and software subscriptions; it makes your marketing efforts ineffective, which costs your organization in more ways than one. The above is only a sample of year-end data cleanup programs. Feel free to comment to let us know what special things you do to get your data in order.

Other Resources

Dive deeper into data retention policies with the following comprehensive posts.

• Part 1: Gold Nugget Data Policy – Six Steps To Trash Your Bad Data
• Part 2: Guide to Deleting Bad Data in Marketo

Holiday Week Stocking Stuffer Tips Schedule

• Monday: Take a Break from Holiday Alerts
• Tuesday: Pause Your Nurture Conversation
• Wednesday:  Gain Intelligence from Your Holiday OOO Replies
• Thursday: Tis the Season: Backfill Intelligence and Data
• Friday: Delete the Junk Before the New Year