Salesforce Data Deduplication: Saving Business Cost and Boosting ROI

According to a recent study, on average 27% of marketers state that bad data costs them 10% or more in lost revenue annually. In fact, in another study, marketers state that 28% of their current customer/prospect data is inaccurate one way or another^[i].

And if you use Salesforce as your CRM, you’re one step ahead of your competitors to deliver superior customer experience and drive exceptional business growth.

However, if your Salesforce database is packed with duplicates and unreliable data, it leads to loss of reputation and missed opportunities, and it can affect your business and worst of all, customers.

Therefore, it is important to deduplicate your Salesforce data to ensure the efficiency of your CRM platform, reduce the possibility of basing business decisions on unreliable data, and effectively measure ROI.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the concept of deduplication of data, its benefits, and how to get started with the deduplication process for a spic-and-span Salesforce database.

What is Data Deduplication in Salesforce?

Data deduplication is the process of eliminating redundant data and reducing processing time in the software system. Every time you back up your CRM platform, you’re copying and storing large data sets. And after a while, it requires a large amount of data storage. Data deduplication optimizes your data storage by ensuring only one unique instance of data is copied and stored.

When you have a spic-and-span Salesforce CRM, your company will gain from clean, high-quality Salesforce data that makes a huge impact.

The Role of Data Quality in Business Success – A Statistical Picture

Business decisions are powered by data and impact the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Here’s a breakdown of the role of data quality in business success.

According to research^[ii]:

• 77% of marketers monitor their data quality and 61% have KPIs for this.
• 84% of the CRM users monitor their data quality and 72% have data quality KPIs.
• Engagement rates (37%) and conversion rates (31%) are commonly reported as data quality metrics by CRM users.
• Only 14% of marketers consider their data quality practices to be excellent when measured against established practices, while 33% report themselves as average or poor.

It is pretty clear that businesses need to invest significantly in best-of-breed deduplication solutions to deliver their data quality objectives.

Benefits of Deduplication in Terms of ROI

Data deduplication is crucial to fuel your marketing, sales, and customer support efforts for you to witness better ROI. Here are other benefits of deduplication in terms of ROI. When you have clean data, it:

• Leads to accurate reports, analytics, better insights, and informed decision making, which, ultimately, leads to better ROI.
• Allows your teams to be more productive as they have to spend less time checking and validating data, which, ultimately, will improve ROI.
• Allows sales and marketing teams to get a better understanding of their customers. Also, they can run successful campaigns and that will help them generate better ROI.
• Provides greater visibility into customers’ data. With these insights, you can find ways to standardize and streamline processes and potentially increase ROI.
• Allows you to build a detailed customer profile to target the right buyers and track customer habits. Tying high-quality data with your customer experience will lead to higher engagement and conversation rates, increased renewal and lower attrition rates, cross-sell and upsell opportunities, a better brand perception, and more loyal customers.

How to Get Started With Cleansing Your Salesforce Data

Now that we’ve established how a clean database can impact your ROI positively, let’s take a look at how to get started with cleaning your Salesforce data.

1. Perform Regular Data Health Audits: As businesses collect a large volume of data, the possibility of having bad and unusable data in your Salesforce CRM becomes high. And when you analyze how this data can lead to missed opportunities, it can make your head spin. Therefore, it is crucial for any business that collects a decent amount of data to perform regular audits to evaluate that data. You can use dedicated auditing software to:

• Filter all of your Salesforce data and pinpoint records with specific types of errors
• Create reports of fields that contain wrong or improper formatting
• Identify inconsistencies and inaccuracy in your data
• Filter your data to identify records that are missing data for specific fields

2. Start Validating: You are what you eat, as they say, and the same is true for your business data. If you have manual data entry from customers through forms, you’re likely to have a high level of data errors. The best thing you can do for the health of your Salesforce database is to make sure that:

• You have proper validation on forms that input data from your Salesforce database
• Emails contain the proper formatting ([email protected])

Proper validation on input forms can put a halt on a lot of data errors before they even hit your database.

3. Use the Right Tools: When you are dealing with a large volume of data, having the right tools on your side is crucial. Here are some types of tools that you may use:

• Auditing software to identify broad errors
• Third-party contact data to correct missing fields and errors
• Deduplication tools to remove duplicate data

To effectively cleanse and detoxify bad data in your Salesforce database, you can consider using a solution like Dupe Manager – a Lightning-ready deduping solution that cleanses duplicates, inconsistencies, and inaccuracy in your Salesforce database.

The Bottom Line

Optimizing Salesforce data can take your marketing, sales, and customer support efforts to the next level. When your Salesforce data is clean and well-maintained, your team will be empowered to improve processes. They will be equipped to make informed decisions, serve customers better, and ultimately, witness better ROI.

Ready to Say Goodbye to Duplicates in Your Salesforce Database? Let’s Talk!

Statistics References

^[i]https://www.validity.com/blog/the-state-of-crm-data-management-2020/
^[ii]https://www.validity.com/blog/data-quality-the-cream-of-the-crop/