How to Improve Your Marketing and Sales Strategies With Data Validation
Using data to inform your marketing and sales strategies is essential if you want to run a successful business. However, businesses nowadays gather so much data from so many channels that it often ends up being corrupted, distorted, or incorrect.
This is why data validation is quickly becoming the norm across various industries. With data validation, businesses can ensure that the data used for marketing and sales decisions is accurate and up-to-date.
So, how can businesses use data validation to improve their marketing and sales strategies? Read on to find out.
What Is Data Validation?
Data validation is the process of checking data you collect for potential errors, and correcting any mistakes you find. This is important because any errors in the data could significantly impact the effectiveness of your marketing and sales strategies.
Data validation process can be done manually or it can be automated. While manual data validation takes a lot of time and effort, automated data validation uses software to quickly scan the data and identify any errors.
You might be asking… isn’t it too technical? Well, data validation can be done by doing heavy coding to extract or validate data for free. But there’s always an easy and fast solution. If data validation seems too daunting, third-party providers can offer services to do the validation for you. Bulk data validation doesn’t need any coding skills. All you have to do is upload your file and let the processor determine the sets for you. This can save time and effort while still ensuring the accuracy of your data.
Automated data validation, on the other hand, can come in the form of an API, which can be integrated into your system. This allows for real-time validation as data is entered into the system, reducing the likelihood of errors.
Here at Searchbug, we have reliable data validation tools that can help individuals and businesses verify and validate their data. Businesses can opt for bulk uploads or integrate an API to eliminate manual work.
With that said, it’s better to set up an automated system to do data validation for you. There are many ways you can go about this. For example, you can integrate automated data validation tools into your existing software, or you can use an external system that works with your current systems.
Needless to say, automated means of data validation will always be more expensive to procure and set up, both time and money-wise, but, in the end, the investment will be more than worth it for your business.
After all, your business directly relies on this data. As most top eCommerce developers from DesignRush agency listing know, you won’t be able to mount effective marketing campaigns, or establish good sales tactics without accurate data.
Essentially, without the means to gather, analyze, and validate data, a business is blind, deaf, and dumb, which is a quick way to failure.
How Can You Ensure Quality Data Validation?
There are a few ways one can ensure a high-quality data validation process. Here’s what you can do:
- Improve Your Forms
The first step to ensuring quality data enters your workflow is to ensure all your data-gathering forms are as consistent and as precise as possible.
One of the best ways to ensure this is to make sure your forms have an automated system attached to them. This system will double-check the info entered, and require certain norms to be met when entering said info.
You’ve probably seen forms that require you to enter certain information, and warn you of mistakes in the info you entered, such as a wrong email address. These kinds of email verifiers that Searchbug offers are extremely important for email marketing as they tell you whether email addresses are valid, invalid, disposable, toxic, and catch-call, which allows the businesses to find the right email addresses through contact data enrichment before sending out email campaigns.
These are all automatic data validation processes put in place to ensure the info you’re entering into the form is consistent with the standards the particular company requires for useful data.
- Create a Process for Data Analysis
Data validation processes go deeper beyond just your forms and the info they gather.
In order to have complete faith in your data, what you need to do is create a whole process that will make sure your data is validated at all times.
Now, to do that you’ll have to ask yourself a few questions: What is the state of the technology you’re using for data validation? How limited is it? What tools are you using to validate your data? What is your process of gathering and validating data like?
Answering all these questions is vital, as they will reveal to you if your data gathering/validation process is solid, or does it have any glaring issues.
When it comes to forming your data analysis process, the place to start are your data entry points. Making sure your data entry points are all easily accessible and infallible ensures that the data you gather has the least amount of mistakes right from the get-go.
- Engage Your Employees
When it comes to gathering data, there is always one glaring weakness that can’t ever be completely eliminated – human error. Humans are prone to making mistakes, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles – it’s unavoidable.
However, it can be mitigated – having an established protocol when gathering data will go a long way toward data validation, even if the data entry point is in the form of an employee getting info from a customer.
With Searchbug’s user-friendly interface, it’s easy for everyone to access and validate and get accurate and reliable personal data.
How Does Data Validation Help You Form a Marketing/Sales Strategy?
Finally, let’s answer the question we posed in our title – how to use data validation to improve your marketing/sales strategy? Well, here are a few ways.
- It Helps Personalize Customer Experience
One of the best things a business can do is personalize their customers’ experience.
All of us complain about getting specific ads, or are creeped out by how good Google is at making suggestions. However, when it comes time to buy something, we’re also super thankful we don’t have to search high and low for the stuff we want.
This is all achieved with data validation. Without proper data validation, your data won’t be reliable enough for you to focus closely on your target audience, and you won’t be able to personalize their experience enough to where you really start seeing impact on your sales.
Searchbug tools include address verification, phone and email validation, IP address lookup, and identity verification, among others. Whether you’re looking to verify customer information or clean up your marketing data, Searchbug’s data validation tools can help you streamline your processes, save time, and improve the overall quality of your data.
- It Helps Consolidate Multi-Channel Marketing Efforts
Most businesses today understand the importance of multi-channel marketing when trying to get their message across. It’s simply the most cost-effective way of getting the maximum amount of exposure and reach that your message needs to drum up enough interest in your products, and start generating leads.
This is where data comes in again to help you with getting that message across. When using multiple channels, you’re able to gather even more data and use the data from one channel to boost your strategies deployed to another.
However, without validating that data, cross-platforming might prove to be a difficult task. If you can’t get enough precise and reliable data, you won’t be able to transfer insights you gained from one channel onto another, making all channels into, effectively, islands.
This, in turn, makes it harder to plan your sales/marketing strategies, as you’ll have to go through the planning phase for each individual one, taking you more time and effort that could have been more useful elsewhere.
- It Makes Your Planning Stage More Time-Effective
Planning is everything in business – you can’t just jump into a marketing campaign before you’ve ironed out all the crinkles during the planning phase. Of course, you can’t make concrete plans without having thoroughly analyzed, verified, and reliable data upon which to build a plan. After all, around 88% of marketers spend most of their time collecting and analyzing data rather than doing anything else.
This is why data validation is so important – it makes you more confident in the data you’re using, allowing you to be more effective when planning your campaigns or forming sales strategies, as well as allowing you to go through that process much more quickly and hit the ground running.
- It Allows for the Creation of the Perfect Customer Profile
Gathering data on your target audience is a surefire way to success. However, not all of your audience are equal – some have only a marginal interest in your product, some are more interested, but there is a certain group of people that you would call the “perfect customer”.
These people are ideal for your business – they fit all the categories and they show promising interest, as well as expressing willingness to do business with you in the long run.
Such customers are a precious resource, as they don’t represent just a steady stream of revenue, but they’re also useful for extracting data about your campaign successes and finding out what sales strategies worked the best on them.
Of course, none of that would be possible without being able to validate your data and make it more reliable. This, at its essence, is the true difference between a particular strategy being a suggestion and an established “best practice”.
Final Words
In the end, it’s no secret that data validation is a vital part of forming marketing and sales practices. As we’ve alluded to many times before throughout the text, data is the foundation of your business, and of your marketing and sales strategies.
Because of this, your data needs to be solid. It needs to be reliable and repeatable, and, without data validation, you’ll have a hard time achieving that. That is why you must invest in tools that help you validate your data, as well as necessary training and protocols that will ensure that your employees also allow for data to be validated as best as possible and that few mistakes are made during the data collection process.
Authors Bio
Sarah Watson is an economist and B2B SaaS content writer. She’s a passionate blogger expressing herself through her creative and informative articles about online marketing strategies.
