Save money with better data management: duplicate record avoidance for the win

The effectiveness of your marketing efforts is largely a result of quality customer database management. Here’s the thing: many databases just aren’t well organized, which can lead to major oversights that waste your marketing budget. Therefore, you must master data management to avoid duplicate records and save your marketing budget.

So, what's the big deal? 

Data is extremely powerful, and it doesn't take long for us to reach the next stage of targeting, retargeting, and analytics. You can build an optimal client information system by collecting data to improve your services and increase your business's sales rate, but when it reaches a certain size,  the issue of duplicate record emerges.

Common reasons for data duplication

There are many reasons that data may be duplicated in a database system.

One of the main reasons is that words are spelled or put together in different ways, either because of typos or a lack of standardization of data. Additionally, different data sources can also contribute to data duplication. Each time a customer interacts with your brand's channels, they may give you different information. For example, a customer can use two different emails to fill out a form on your site and get in touch with customer service.

In this case, all that needs to be done is to find the source interaction and merge it with the new information to make a single contact. Hence, you can avoid a duplicate record. Still, this process is complicated, especially when merging a lot of contacts and making sure they don't come from two different people.

Human errors are another common cause of duplicate records.  People in charge of the CRM system sometimes add contacts or make accounts without checking to see if they are already in the system. Even if duplicates are flagged in your CRM, not everyone sees them.

Lastly, software bugs in the system can easily cause hundreds or even thousands of duplicates that were not expected.

Duplicate records impact your marketing and sales efforts

In simple terms, duplicate data potentially destroys the value and profits that an organization can receive.

Data duplication impacts most business functions, including costs, marketing campaign effectiveness, and customer care. It may also impact your ability to understand customers and the accuracy of the decisions and solutions proposed.

Beyond this, manual de-duplication (the process of combining and organizing duplicate records) is both time-consuming and costly, leading to lower productivity and performance of the entire business. Before their data can be used to inform strategic decisions, data analysts must spend significantly more time inspecting, analyzing, and validating it. 

Because of data duplication, the process of cleaning and reorganizing the data will take more time, which will slow down the rate at which data-driven solutions and strategies are developed.

In addition, the results of the analysis might not be reliable if you cannot quickly perform an analysis of the data and extract useful information from it. 

If your company is unable to reach its customers, it may miss out on many lucrative business opportunities, fail to meet its revenue goals, and fall further behind its rivals.

How to master data management

Many factors play into data management, but here are the key points you’ll need to understand in order to effectively master it.

Data protection

Ensuring data confidentiality of the information collected from customers - such as phone numbers, addresses, regular habits, diets, and other information - is vital.

This allows businesses to build trust with their customers and avoid getting into trouble due to data breaches. Since fitness studios interact with many types of data, they need to ensure data on customer information is securely managed by specialized software or tools.

Privacy breaches cause significant losses for both customers and businesses. So, if you don’t want your reputation to take a dive, you should pay close attention and master data management.

Regular backup and updates

Always have a backup plan!

One of the serious incidents that have a significant impact on the speed of sales as well as the reputation of the business is the loss of data and customer information. 

To manage customer data safely when problems arise, you must update and back up your customers' data in multiple locations regularly. This approach makes it simple to restore data in the event of an emergency.

Proper data collection

Though the widespread assumption is that data means everything, this is not entirely correct. Too much data can cause a slew of issues for your business; in fact, IBM suggests that excess, unused data can drastically increase your business’s overhead costs and leave you open to poor customer relationships and potential legal issues.

The excess of data also complicates the process of managing customer data. Because not all customer data is required to use and benefit customers, businesses must determine what information is required and should be collected. The information gathered from customers must then be used strategically to benefit the company.

When businesses use automation software to collect information about their customers, they must consider whether the collected data is truly necessary and useful. 

Adopting a roadmap, strategic, and customer-transparent approach will assist businesses in reducing unnecessary data collection.

Master data management software

The 4.0 technology era ushers in intelligent software solutions for businesses. 

Users of the information system are generally capable of quickly identifying the information associated with an individual, as well as locating the identity of the contact behind syntactic differences.

However, once a certain volume of data is collected, it becomes critical to employ automation mechanisms to detect and correct these differences, as well as to remove duplicate data.

Customer data is regarded as a living asset that must be safeguarded and managed in a secure and intelligent manner. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) software and automated end-to-end solutions can be used to effectively store customer data. These tools are designed to collect, manage, and analyze customer information, automatically.

This software helps solve the fear of missing or redundant information for fitness businesses.

Save time and money by avoiding duplication

Data duplication can be frustrating and, at its worst, wasteful. Businesses need reliable strategies for avoiding this resource sink and maintaining accurate, useful records for their customers.

With effective duplicate record management, your team will get more out of its time, and save money on marketing.