Your company’s first-party data, the information your customers give you directly, is likely your most valuable marketing asset. It lives in your CRM system, powers your email campaigns, targets your ad spend, and informs your business strategy.
There’s just one problem: It’s rotting.
This isn’t a failure of technology. It’s a simple fact of life. Data decay, or the natural degradation of data accuracy over time, is inevitable. People move, change their names, get new phone numbers, and switch email providers.
What was a perfect clean customer database on Monday is slightly less accurate on Tuesday. And over a year, that decay can turn your greatest asset into a significant liability.
The Real Cost of Bad Data
We often think of data cleanup as a nice to have IT project. In reality, it’s a critical financial issue. For a business of any size, data decay creates immediate measurable costs, especially in marketing.
- Wasted Marketing Spend: This is the most obvious cost. Every piece of direct mail sent to the wrong address is wasted money on print and postage. Every email that hard bounces damages your sender reputation, making it harder to reach the customers whose address you do have correct.
- Inefficient Ad Targeting: Are you running lookalike audiences on Facebook or Google based on your best customers? If that core CRM data is outdated, you’re building models on a faulty foundation. You’re effectively paying to find new customers who look just like people who no longer exist at that data point.
- Poor Customer Experience (CX): This is a massive, often invisible, cost.
- Greeting a customer by the wrong name (common after marriage or in data-entry errors).
- Sending irrelevant offers based on old preferences.
- Failing to recognize a loyal customer because their new email created a duplicate, “new” profile.
This doesn’t just waste marketing dollars; it actively annoys your customers and pushes them to competitors.
- Flawed Business Strategy: Your leadership team relies on your CRM data to make critical decisions. If your data shows your core demographic is 25–35-year-olds, but a large portion of that segment has aged out and the data is just old, your entire product and marketing strategy could be targeting the wrong people.
Why Is This Happening? (The Culprits of Decay)
Data decay isn’t a single event. It’s a constant, low level process. Your consumer data is decaying right now because:
- People move: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, millions of people move every year. Their address is now wrong.
- People change jobs: Their work email is gone.
- People change names: After marriage or a legal change, their identity in your system is incorrect.
- People change preferences: The new homeowner you targeted three years ago is now a parent of toddlers. Their needs are completely different, but your data is stuck in the past.
- Data entry errors: A simple typo at sign-up can create a ghost profile that’s wrong from day one.
- Duplicates: A customer signs up for a webinar with one email and buys a product with another. You now have two incomplete profiles and are marketing to them as two separate people.
How to Fight Back: A 4-Step Plan for Data Health
You can’t stop data decay, but you can manage it. Treating your data as a living asset that requires maintenance is key.
Begin by Validating at the Source
The easiest way to keep data clean is to prevent bad data from getting in.
- Email Validation: Use real-time email verification tools on your sign-up forms.
- Address Verification: Implement address auto-complete and validation (like the USPS NCOA – National Change of Address) at checkout.
- Standardize Fields: Don’t use open text fields where a dropdown will do (e.g., for “State”). This prevents typos and non-standard entries.
Schedule Regular Data Hygiene
You can’t just clean your data once. It must be a process.
- Deduplicate: Run a deduping process in your CRM at least quarterly to merge duplicate profiles.
- Cleanse and Append: Use a third-party data service to scrub your list. These services can correct misspellings, update addresses for people who have moved, and append new information, like demographics, to give you a richer profile.
- Manage Bounces: Have a clear policy. If an email hard bounces, remove it immediately. If it soft bounces (e.g., mailbox is full), try a few more times before automatically suppressing it.
Empower Your Customers
This is the most powerful tool for first-party data. Your customers know their information is correct. Give them a reason and a way to update it.
- Create a Preference Center: Don’t just have an unsubscribe button. Have a “Manage My Preferences” page where customers can update their email, their address and most importantly, what kind of content they want to receive.
- Offer an Incentive: Run an “Is this you?” campaign once a year, offering a 10% discount or a contest entry for customers who log in and confirm or update their profile details.
Use a Trusted Third-Party Data Provider Like Digital Segment to Validate and Clean your Data
Partnering with Digital Segment allows for real time integration with their Identity Gateway API.
- Easy Integration to Real Time API: Run live queries from your CRM to verify any consumer records, including phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and much more.
- Enhance Your Data: Complete the profile of your customers by appending new or missing information on the consumer record.
- Understand Your Audience: Learn more about your customers by adding demographics to gain deeper insights into your customer base and identify new audiences to target with your marketing campaigns
Your CRM data is the engine of your marketing machine. But like any engine, it requires regular maintenance. By accepting that data decay is inevitable and building processes to manage it, you can cut marketing waste, improve your customer experience, and make smarter decisions for your business.
Don’t let your most valuable asset become a liability. Contact us today to learn more about Digital Segment’s solutions.