5 Steps to Consolidate Your Data for the New Year

‘Tis the season for holiday lights, childrens’ singing voices, and realizing the third tool set we bought impulsively online would make a great gift for Uncle Dave. We only used that wrench twice, right? The holidays are a common time to purge, whether it’s after the gifting phase, or simply in preparation for the new year. In that spirit, we suggest a data purge heading into 2016. No one wants a dusty database lingering when we’re getting pumped up about new resolutions. Before we get to our easy data purging steps, we’re going to quickly identify what it could cost you if you don’t do this. In short: revenue and valuable contacts.

You’re probably leaving money on the table

Most of us have accumulated hundreds, thousands, millions of contacts – leads from advertising, sales conversations, events, and more. Unfortunately, many end up lying dormant in disparate CSV files, stale CRM reports, or old email lists. Most of those leads aren’t free. Let’s say your average cost to acquire a lead is $50, and you have 1,000 leads scattered across various places. That’s $50,000 of cost going to waste. Imagine if you could re-engage 25% (250), of those, and then 5% gave you another chance, spending $1,000 each? That’s another $12,500 – or a 25% return on your investment. This isn’t a pipe dream. Don't leave money on the table A scattered database also means you probably don’t have a good sense of your business contacts – people who could be repeat purchasers or influencers eager to give word of mouth recommendations. So let’s clean it up.

Step 1: Gather the data

There’s this purging fad right now, pioneered by a woman named Marie Kondo. If you’re trying to organize clothing, she suggests putting every single item you own on the floor in front of you so that you fully understand the massive amount of crap you’ve accumulated. With that in mind, we’re going to start by putting all of our data on the floor in front of us. To centralize your contacts in marketing software, track them down from:

Email lists in your email software or MailChimp account
Leads, opportunities or account data in your Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM)
Sales contacts spreadsheets
Scattered business cards or order requests from recent events
Buried email threads

You’ll then need to compile all of your contacts into a spreadsheet, organized by column headings such as name, company, product, geography, contact type, or any other info that matters for your business.

Step 2: De-dupe and validate

De-duping sounds cool, right? I feel cool just writing the word. By de-dupe, we essentially mean consolidate – or put the stuff you don’t want in trash bags, and haul it off to Goodwill. After you’ve got everyone in a spreadsheet, you’ll likely notice some contacts have multiple emails or addresses, or that you’ve picked up some superfluous data along the way. You’ll want to massage it in Excel or Google Spreadsheets, using vlookups or data sorting to find duplicate addresses, consolidate multiple rows into a single contact, and delete extraneous stuff. There are also a few tools that can help. DupeCatcher will de-duplicate your data when you upload it into your system, though note that it won’t consolidate historical stuff – it’ll only catch duplicates at the point of entry. Another is DemandTools, which is specifically geared toward Salesforce users. It’ll de-dupe, verify (check for accuracy and inconsistencies), normalize (organize your data into columns based on attributes), import, export, and mass delete.

Validating your data

The next step is validating the data, which you can do with services such as Data Validation that grade your email addresses and recommend which to include and disclude in your marketing. You’ll be able to see the percentage of deliverable, undeliverable, and engaged email contacts in your database, and then decide who to keep around. Note that services like this often charge by contact, so it’s important to consolidate first. We suggest doing this before uploading the list into your marketing automation software, so that you start fresh with a clean, safe database of opt-in emails that won’t report you as a spammer.

Step 3: Import your contacts

This is the part of the purging process where you return things to their rightful location – the shelf, the closet, wherever. Once you’ve gathered all of your contacts and selected which marketing and/or CRM tools you plan to use, it’s time to import your contacts. The process will look different depending on which software you choose, but each vendor has detailed step-by-step articles explaining how to go through this process.

Most platforms have pre-defined standard fields, and custom fields. For example, in Autopilot (marketing automation software), you can map spreadsheet headings with contact fields, such as first name, last name, company, phone, email, industry. You can also define custom fields for your business (e.g. product name, location, VIP status, preference, etc.).

Step 4: Separate contacts into groups

OK, we’ve reached the fun part – here’s where you get to organize your closet by color, or your bookshelf by author, or whatever sort of organizing blows your hair back. Once you have consolidated and imported your contacts list, you will be able to sort your contacts into important segments, such as VIPs, paying customers, trialists, or competitors. You will also be able to append each customer record with valuable information from online (or offline) sources, including product usage, website or content engagement, or social profile data. Then you can take action by creating multi-channel touchpoints (e.g. emails, text messages, calls, letters) to engage each group in a personalized way. To give you a kick start, here are segments that apply to a wide variety of businesses:

**VIP customers **
**Paying customers **
**Hot prospects **
Product niche lovers : those who are passionate about product A, B, or C. Example: Pinot Noir.
Influencers: bloggers, journalists, or companies who have a large following.
Past customers: those who bought from you more than six months ago, for instance.
Recent buyers: people who have bought from you in the past month or less.
At-risk/recently inactive users
Power users
**Geography-based **
Business type: B2B, B2C, B2B/B2C, value added reseller (VAR).
Industry: software, retail, financial services, education, government, etc.
Channel: contacts who prefer only specific forms of communication, like text messages, calls, emails or social media.
Company size
Partners
Competitors: create suppression lists based on the email domain name to exclude rivals.

Step 5: Keep it going

Now you have to make sure you don’t refill your closets with a bunch of crap you never use – or in other words, be intentional about what you buy from here on out. Make contact management an ongoing initiative by:

Reviewing the status of your contact database each month.
Creating a template spreadsheet for details you want to capture from any event or campaign.
Defining processes for logging every sales interaction, lead status change, and new sale in your CRM. Which fields are required? Consider including activity logging in your sales team’s compensation plans.
Connect other marketing apps into your contact database that will grow and extend your contact record. For example, Zapier and Segment can help pull data from over 500 different tools into Autopilot’s marketing automation software, including from within your own product

This knowledge is the foundation for your sales and marketing teams to connect with contacts at the right time on the right channel. In sum, if you clean up your data and then remain intentional about who and how you enter contacts into your database, you’ll be clean and breezy all through 2016. **Do you have your own database cleaning strategy? We’d love to hear it – or your thoughts on ours – in the comment section below. **