target-marketingManaging your marketing leads and prospects can be challenging.  Done right, your marketing database can be a treasure chest of information that can help your organization save time and money while gaining strategic insights. Done wrong, it can become a confusing mess that could ultimately lead to anger and frustration among your clients, prospects, and coworkers.

Imagine you acquire and import a new marketing list. It happens to include one of your current clients. They then receive a promotional email from you offering a deeper discount on what they’ve just purchased. Now you’re fielding angry phone calls from the customer, the receptionist, the customer service reps, and your boss. You’ve just alienated a client and they think your organization is disorganized and unprofessional. They might even tell all their friends or rant on social media.

A marketing database that is well maintained and used properly is a powerful sales tool. Here are a few tips that can help.

Enforce Strict Standards for Entering Data

Garbage In = Garbage Out

If you want your communications to be effective, properly targeted, and professional looking, it is important to type the entire company name and address. Abbreviations should be avoided entirely, including terms like street, avenue, drive, and parkway. Abbreviations can also lead to duplicate entries.

Make Guidelines and Train Your Sales/Marketing Team

It is important the sales team understands why the guidelines are in place. Reasons include making sure all the information about a prospect is located in one place so they can be marketed to according to their status.

About Importing Lists — Prevent Duplicate Entries

A risk associated with Importing lists includes creating several hundred or thousands of duplicate entries. Undoing this can sometimes require restoring a backup.

The best scenario would be importing a list and appending to any existing information. For example, if the information includes job titles and contact information that may be more current than what is on the list. However, if your salesperson is actively pursuing a lead, you don’t want to overwrite their information.

When importing information, determine a unique identifier that you can match against to prevent duplicates. In many marketing databases, a company name is not enough. Depending on which database you use, just having a different spelling (or a missing comma!) can result in a duplicate entry. DBA names, parent companies, corporate headquarters, and branches can add to the confusion.

What about phone numbers? Those are not necessarily good unique IDs either, because the list you buy may have a general contact number, whereas the contact in your database has Jenny Buyer’s direct line. By all means, you do not want to overwrite Jenny’s phone number and lose all your hard work!

The best advice I have to received is to use the DUNS number as the unique ID for a business. This is a unique nine-digit ID number that Dun & Bradstreet assigns to each physical location of a business. Be aware also that Headquarters or Corporate Offices will have a different DUNS number than the local business they control.

A final importing tip: When you import your list, figure out a way to tag it, so if you make a mistake, you can batch delete everything you just imported. Many times the import date is sufficient to do this, but we found that adding a specific field just for this purpose was the best way for us to manage this.

Back it Up

Backing up your database should be done regularly and often. Data can become corrupted. A new employee could accidentally delete information. Turn on history tracking in your settings and be vigilant. Limit user access so they can’t destroy all your hard work.