Keeping redundant and irrelevant customer data can be detrimental to your sales and marketing activities. Here’s a list of tips that can help you keep your CRM database clean.
A good CRM tool has always made life easy for sales reps. It is a centralized tool that lets sales reps know everything about their leads and prospects, helping them sell effectively. But an inaccurate, incomplete or old CRM data is a productivity killer. To avoid your CRM getting clogged up with irrelevant or inaccurate data, it is important to clean the database routinely.
In this article, we will look at eight CRM tips on how you can remove fake accounts to keep your CRM data clean. For your reading convenience, we have split the article into two sections. The first section addresses how to delete your existing fake records, while the second section explains how you can prevent fake data from being recorded in the CRM system.
*Note: In this article, bot-generated, outdated or irrelevant data is collectively addressed as fake data.
Also Read: CRM Best Practices and Innovations for Lead Gathering and Lead ScoringOpens a new window
Deleting Existing Fake Data
Removing fake entries from your existing records is the first step to cleaning up your CRM. For starters, if you have a few bad records, you can go about removing them manually, no hassles there. But if your CRM is infested with spammy data, you need to set some specific filters to eliminate junk records. Here are five types of records you should get rid of and free your CRM.
Tip: Before you begin purging any records, it is a good practice to back up your data. The backup would make it easier to retrieve relevant information in case if something goes awry during the process.
1. Duplicate Entries
**Although you can set up validators to check for duplicates in your CRM, they can’t be 100% accurate all the time. A slight change in the information storage can create a new record altogether.** Duplicate entries cause a lot of problems for salespeople from the personalization point of view. Therefore, it is necessary to check frequently for redundant entries. You can either merge the two records if both the entries combined can give a more holistic view of the lead, or remove the older entry based on the most recent email address used by salespeople to communicate with them.
2. Bounce Email Addresses
Email bounces can be categorized as a hard bounce and a soft bounce.
Hard bounces are emails that return permanently to the sender. This happens due to reasons like the email address being discontinued if the person has left the organization, or the email is either sent from a temporary domain or is blocked. Such contacts should be deleted right away.
Soft bounces, on the other hand, are temporary bounces. This happens when the mail server is unavailable for the time being, an autoresponder, such as an out-of-office response, is set, or the recipient’s inbox is full. Soft bounces should be deleted if their bounce rate remains constant throughout a long period.
3. Inactive Contacts
Remove any leads that haven’t opened or responded to your email campaigns over the past six months. But before you do so, send a re-engagement email to check if they would still be interested to hear from you. If the result remains the same, feel free to purge that contact data.
4. Spam/Bot Entries
**Sometimes you might notice a sudden spike in the website traffic, and you are getting an unusual number of sign-ups. This happens when your website has come under a bot attack. Sounds quite scary but it is not.** Bot entries are quite easy to recognize as the form field entries always contain garbage values and email addresses have domains such as .ru, .ua., .xyz, etc. You can delete such entries from your CRM and set up filters in your analytics tool that would not record visits from such domains or sources.
5.Contacts Who Didn’t Sign-Up
You might have purchased an email list, scrapped websites or manually built an email list when starting your email marketing efforts. What you need to realize is that these contacts did not voluntarily opt-in to be a part of your database and therefore should be deleted from your CRM.
Sending them emails will yield poor campaign performance, as well as negatively impact your sender reputation. It will also land your emails straight into the spam folder of your recipients.
Also Read: Expand Horizon: From CRM to AI to Generate Top Funnel LeadsOpens a new window
Preventing Fake Accounts from Getting into the CRM Records
A better way to keep your CRM data clean is to set preventive measures at the data gathering sources. Let’s look at the three simple practices that you can implement to avoid fake accounts getting into the CRM.
1. Encourage Salespeople to Maintain Proper Data
**One of the reasons why duplicate records get populated in the CRM is due to the lack of standard CRM practices.** Salespeople are always on the go, and therefore they might not fill in all the required customer data in the CRM to keep the records updated. This is a never-ending cycle and to stop it, set certain fields such as name, designation, organization, contact number, email, etc. as mandatory. By encouraging salespeople to follow these practices, it becomes easy for marketers to focus on personalization.
2. Implement the Double Opt-In Sign-Up Method
**In the double opt-in method, once the user submits the form, they should confirm their sign-up through a confirmation mail. The extra confirmation step ensures that the entries you are receiving are valid ones and not coming from spambots or click farms.**
3. Put Stringent Validation Rules on Form Fields
One of the biggest problems of inbound marketing efforts is visitors filling in fake details to download gated content. You can apply the following validation rules to curb users from filling in invalid information.
- The name field must not contain any numeric or special character
- The contact number should strictly be numeric
- Check if the email entered comes from a valid domain. If you are a B2B enterprise, you can ask users to enter their corporate email address to get on your mailing list.
- Use ReCAPTCHA to discourage bots sign-ups
- Use HoneyPot fields. HoneyPot fields are not visible to humans, so if someone adds their information in that field, it becomes evident that a bot sent the entry
Â
Also Read: Top Five Myths About CRM DebunkedOpens a new window
The cost of not maintaining your CRM database is enormous. Every effort you put into personalization is at the risk of becoming a train wreck, if you don’t maintain the CRM. Since the CRM is central to all sales, and partially marketing activities, when you put the tactics mentioned above into practice, the prospects of payout are quite promising.