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Expert Answers to Biz Questions
Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.
Top 6 Practices in Keeping your Data Clean
There is a lot of effort and budget invested in making sure that you have correct, standardized and verified data and it’s very important to keep it clean and also relevant.
With clean and relevant data, you will have the best results from your marketing programs or the automation systems. Before starting to implement data cleaning, you must have a certain goal and follow it through.
You can make sure that your data remains clean with these next tips.
1. Developing a Plan for Data Quality
Save time and money with making a data quality plan and have all departments keep an open communication. This will help you find all the quality errors or incorrect data and also helps your team develop a project plan to solve the issues. You can also assign a data steward to be responsible in managing the data and administrate it according to your cleansing plan. For database cleansing, Apart-Data offers an end to end solution.
2. Check the Data at the Point of Entry
It’s very important to check all data when it enters the database. This will also let you see if there are duplicates or not. Standardized and automated data entry is a vital requirement that your data steward can take care of. This way all data fields and formats will be complete and consistent.
3. Is Your Data Accurate?
Use a good tool and invest in it to clean information. This is how you will be able to validate the accuracy of your data in your data base, in real-time. Only then marketing will be effective if the data and the tools are of high quality.
Create a good schedule to clean data and let a partner company do it for you, so you can use your skills and time on more important issues. Your database must have periodical cleansing and contain fresh and validated data.
4. Check for Duplicates
Forget about manual work and invest in a tool that will identify the duplicates for you. This way, you and your team will have more time to solve other matters.
5. Ask Your Customers to Deliver Clean and Updated Data
Capture important and accurate data from your customers and prospects to add it in your marketing programs. This will turn out to be time-saving and cost-effective.
6. Append Data
After you have solved the standardizing, validating and checked for duplicates, it’s time to append the data. You can easily do it with a reliable third party source that will get information from first-party sites. They will capture, clean and compile the data and analyze it. The reports will help you develop and strengthen customer segmentation and you will be able to send targeted information back to your customers or your prospects.
When is the Data Successfully Cleaned?
A successful data cleaning should include these three practices:
Single data sources and combinations of multiple sources have been checked for major errors or inconsistencies and removed afterward.
Tools are the best investment to reduce manual input when it comes to inspecting or programming.
Data must work in conjunction with particular mapping functions and with schema-related data conversions.
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