If you accidentally put the wrong fuel in your car, the accepted wisdom is that under no circumstances should you start the engine. When you start the engine, it circulates the contaminated fuel which can cause havoc and potentially expensive damage to your car.

Now, think of your business as a car. And think of your business data as the engine. For everything to run smoothly, your engine needs to be filled with clean, high quality information. If you fill it with bad data, it will circulate around your database and contaminate the good data – causing havoc and potentially expensive damage to your business.

Poor quality data can prove expensive to a business. Bad data results in bad decision making, poor customer service, a lack of insight and awkward sales calls. But, most importantly, a lack of high quality data is going to cost you time and money.

Having clean, accurate and high quality is crucial for a number of reasons. For starters, it saves time searching and looking for information on customers, prospects and leads. Outdated records mean you or your sales team spend more time trying to track down the right person; it means embarrassing sales calls to a person who left a company years ago; it means less ROI on marketing campaigns directed to the wrong person, email address, phone number or address.

When it comes to marketing your business, good data is crucial. It’s next to impossible to execute a targeted marketing campaign using bad quality data. Bad quality data results in low success rates and a poor return on investment because you’re aiming it at the wrong people using the wrong methods. Or just targeting the wrong people entirely.

A lack of insight into your target market caused by inaccurate data leads to misguided and poorly planned campaigns. It doesn’t matter if you craft the most eye-catching campaigns or captivating content; if you’re working off of inaccurate data the chances are it’s not going to reach your target audience or market.

The most important impact that bad data quality has on a business is financial. In a recent study, Experian found that 75% of businesses in the UK lose, on average, 14% of their annual revenue due to contaminated data.

This cost is spread across all the areas we’ve talked about and is arguably the biggest headache that dirty data causes for business. The bad decisions and blindspots in judgement caused by inaccuracies in your business information can have a serious impact on the financial health of your business.

Simply, bad data can cost you money – a lot of money.

Working with only good data enables you to execute marketing and sales strategies that cheaper and more cost-effective. Your staff will spend less time looking for or updating information, so they can focus on their work rather than admin duties.

It also provides a better insight and understanding of your target market and customers, leading to better campaigns that can be tailored to a customer’s history. It leads to less money spent being spent on campaigns that do not generate results; and you end up spending less money spent on follow up campaigns because you got it right first time.

Clean data is crucial to the success of your business. If you want your business’s engine to run smoothly, it’s important that you only fill it up with high quality data. For this, you need to purge your database and update it regularly to keep it from becoming contaminated.

For help building and cleaning your database or removing bad data, speak to Focus One today.