How to Use Marketing Automation for Internal Workflows and Data Hygiene

Data stands at the heart of marketing automation software, and thus it is vital to maintain good data hygiene. Poor data hygiene often leads to your automation strategy’s downfall. You need to reduce inconsistent data as it cuts into sales and marketing productivity. Your metrics and forecasts become less accurate while your pipeline drops.

Data hygiene is not only an essential issue for sales operations, but is also essential to streamline other internal processes such as budgeting, digital asset management, and marketing, to name a few. Unfortunately, bad data does not correct itself and needs to be updated timely and strategically. To improve your marketing outcome, you need to ensure proper data hygiene by identifying and updating inaccurate data.

Here is how you can use marketing automation to maintain good data hygiene and improve your internal workflows:

Remove Dummy Records from Your CRM Automatically

By opting for a scheduled trigger, such as a manual trigger or a webhook trigger, you can define when to test your records. For example, you can identify all records that contain “test” and delete them. On finding any such record, you need to format them so that the sales team can focus on potential leads.

Automate Record Reassignment from Inactive Owners

Every time an account owner changes, you need to use automation to transfer ‘ownerless’ accounts to active users seamlessly otherwise, it can get tricky to maintain reliable records down the road. You need to find inactive accounts and route their leads to new owners. It is ideal to find accounts with no active sales owner associated with them so that you can distribute these accounts among your active sales reps. This helps eliminate any guesswork and delays when account ownership is unpopulated by assigning accounts, clear owners.

Corrects Data Values with Automation

Automation can help correct common missing data and improve data quality saving your organization from losing ROI. Automation of repetitive tasks lets the organization trust its data. That includes other benefits like helping team members concentrate on more significant work. Automation is expensive and time-consuming to implement. However, it is always good to increase efficiency and leverage machine learning to have confidence in data for particular tasks. Moreover, data quality mistakes can ruin your brand reputation as well. 

Prevent Duplicates at the Source

You need to run a deduping process over your entire database before you connect your marketing automation platform to any additional system. Most marketing automation platforms offer a cleansing mechanism to dedupe effectively. Make sure you conduct this process regularly.

You should also turn off or archive old emails, landing pages, workflows, and programs. At the same time, review records that are still missing critical data. Maintaining consistency is the key element to sustaining good data hygiene in your database. You also need to constantly evolve your sales processes as your company continues to grow. Mapping old data values to new ones whenever you introduce a new process, field, or field value into your data source is very important.

Unhygienic data such as dummy leads and ownerless accounts can be taken care of by using automation. This will also eliminate time-consuming admin work so that marketers can focus on more strategic projects. Automation also reduces the developer resource burden that data cleansing requires. Your sales team will spend less time searching for and editing poorly formatted data with better data hygiene. Moreover, your operations and analytics teams will also have a more accurate record to generate insights.