How Duplicate Data Burns a Hole in Your Marketing Budget

User information is the core of every business and it keeps on piling up year over year (YoY), making its management challenging for organizations. The latest estimates reveal that approximately 328.77 million TB of data is generated daily.^[i] With such staggering volumes, the presence of bad or duplicate data is inevitable. This poses a significant problem for businesses as duplicate data hampers operational efficiency, diminishes customer satisfaction, and leads to a substantial financial burden.

Where Does Duplicate Data Come From?

Multiple sources of data are a major reason behind duplicate data. A customer/prospect may provide different information when responding to multiple marketing campaigns. In addition, data augmentation through list purchases might exacerbate your duplicate data woes.

Marketing data is the lifeblood of every business, and incorrect marketing data can impede productivity and squander resources. Reports indicate that 29% of marketing campaigns are negatively affected by bad data, thus, impacting performance and requiring rework.^[ii]

If you are a marketing automation platform user, the implications of duplicate data are particularly pronounced. For instance, within the Marketo platform, duplicate data leads to skewed analytics and inaccurate lead scoring that can wreak havoc on your campaigns. Imagine sending the same email blast to the same person multiple times – not a great customer experience, right? This can lead to unsubscribes and poor brand image.

Impact of Duplicate Data in Your Marketo Database

Damaged Brand Reputation

Communication efficiency can be ensured by keeping your lead data clean and up to date. Customer/prospect contact data in Marketo is the source of existing, new, and referral business. With duplicate data, the probability of bombarding a customer or prospect with multiple messages is very high. This, in turn, can simply mar your engagement strategy and adversely impact your brand reputation.

Inability to Make Informed Decisions

Informed business decisions are data-driven. And to make such decisions, you need to ensure that your data is accurate, whole, and original. Duplicate data in Marketo can exaggerate your marketing performance reports and lead to inaccurate ROI measurements. It may also impact your marketing attribution analysis, affecting your decision-making.

Reduced Lead Personalization

Duplicate data in Marketo hampers your ability to deliver personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. Without a clear understanding of your audience, you risk sending irrelevant messages or offers to your leads that result in decreased engagement and conversion rates. Additionally, duplicate records can skew segmentation efforts, making it challenging to identify and prioritize high-value leads.

Marketing Budget Wastage

Marketo charges you for the size of your lead database. This means you continue paying more for the unnecessary duplicates that keep accumulating in your database. When you run campaigns for those duplicate leads, untargeted messaging will lead to flattened click-through rates and a waste of your money and time.

Hindered Lead Nurturing and Conversion

When multiple duplicate records exist for the same lead, it becomes challenging to track their engagement history accurately. As a result, marketers may miss crucial touchpoints in the customer journey, leading to disjointed communication and missed opportunities. Moreover, duplicate leads can confuse sales teams, causing them to prioritize the wrong leads or overlook potential high-value prospects.

How to Keep Your Marketo Database Clean?

Preventing data duplication in Marketo is the key to avoiding all the above problems. It is an automated process of identifying possible duplicates and merging them using algorithms and data processing in your lead database.

Clean data means error-free data, which if ensured before running your marketing campaigns, can help you save tons of money. Cleaning your data costs significantly less as compared to the cost incurred by duplicate data.

Preventing data duplication in the first place costs even less – as much as $1 per record.^[iii] Plus, you get augmented revenue, eventually.

That said, keeping duplicate records at bay altogether is tricky for a Marketo user. You also need to deal with the duplicates already existing in your database. This requires a dedicated Marketo dedupe solution that automatically eliminates duplicates from your database and prevents the creation of new ones.

M-Clean – The Perfect Marketo Dedupe Tool

M-Clean is a powerful Marketo dedupe tool that goes beyond the standard data duplication detection and merging. Meticulously crafted by Marketo experts at Grazitti Interactive, M-Clean identifies and removes duplicate records in real-time automatically.

It also merges the duplicate data in CRMs such as Salesforce and MS Dynamics to keep your database healthy and your marketing performance thriving.

Here are some key functionalities of M-Clean that make it an ideal fit for Marketo data cleaning:

• Detect duplicate leads and merge them with new leads in Marketo or CRM
• Define dedupe criteria as per your business requirements
• Configure rules to identify the winning record for merging
• Check the history of merged records at any moment
• Configure field data to append, prepend, identify oldest created, and recently created/modified
• Use Fuzzy Match Principle to merge duplicates with the same first name, last name, company name, and more

To Wrap Up

Duplicate data is the silent killer of your marketing performance. But with a Marketo dedupe tool like M-Clean in your arsenal, you can win the battle against duplicates and prevent wasting your precious marketing budget. Get ready to unlock the full potential of your Marketo database and take your marketing effectiveness to new heights.

Statistical References:

[i] Exploding Topics – Amount of Data Created Daily (2024)

[ii] Sureshot – The High Cost of Poor Marketing Data Orchestration

[iii] Plauti – Calculating ROI – The Cost of Quality