How To Maintain An Unsoiled Database In Your Easy To Use CRM Tool For SMB

Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that collects and accumulates all the data of leads, prospects, and customers and keeps them stored in the CRM software’s database, which becomes the single source of truth for nurturing happy customers and driving conversions.

However, if your prospect and customer database in the CRM is in a mess, with data integrity issues, the same database in the CRM can do more harm than good and can be counterintuitive to the purpose of buying an easy to use CRM for your company.

Hence to help the users of new easy to use CRM for rapid business growth, here are some of the most preferred ways for sustaining an unsoiled database in your CRM so that companies can maximize the returns on their hard-earned investments for the best CRM for SMB that they choose for their organization.

• Bring in only important data when importing contact lists

When you are importing lists of leads into your best small business CRM, you should do so with extreme care. Always remain vigilant as to where is your data coming from? Which fields were used in the previous software and how do they correspond to the fields in your new CRM system? For example, you might be having some other additional custom fields in the previously used tool that are no longer useful for your business. Hence just concentrate only on the important and pertinent data fields that are critical for your business while importing them in your new small business CRM software.

• Be sure all data is rightly formatted before importing contact lists

When you want to export data from a certain software to another system, with the intention of importing it into another, there are certain factors that you need to keep in mind. This process is done in most cases by importing and exporting data of a CVS (Comma Separated Value) spreadsheet.

Therefore, it is most crucial that the prospect and customer data in the exported file complies with the requirement of your new software system and its data importing process. This means every column header must have the exact identical titles and even the data is in the same format (i.e., data, number, percentage, plain text, and others) as it was before. Make certain it all aligns before doing the import since otherwise, you will view errors as there will be several data that will not get transferred into your new CRM software system.

• Identify important data fields to avoid partial contact records

If you wish to market your offerings to these new contacts in the future, it is critical that you must define which data fields are most essential to have while importing the contacts to your new small business easy to use CRM system. For example, you can decide that without email, name, or phone numbers the lead data do not constitute a fully populated record of contact in the database.

Therefore, settle on which fields hold the most essential information important to your business model, and remain sure that your web forms also ask for that information. Even if you are manually entering data into your new CRM software, remain careful that those data collects are essential information before entering them into your CRM database.

• Place validation on your phone fields and email on forms

Now it is a common issue with all businesses that someone will visit your website and thereafter place incomplete or completely irrelevant and falsified information in your web forms to receive your offerings. However, there are ways to avoid it. Allowing people to complete your form with fake information creates an incredibly messy CRM database, cutting down on the efficiency of the CRM system.

Therefore, as a remedy, place validation measures on your telephone number and email fields. In the present times, most easy to use CRM software platforms allows a user to instantly verify if an email or phone number is real and active. So put these measures in place, and do not forget to include CAPTCHA on your web forms to ward off the onslaughts of the bots.

• Regularly check for duplicates

Records that are created and stored as duplicates can have a more harmful effect on the efficiency of your marketing strategies than you can even think of.

For example, if you have two or more records of the same prospect, it becomes a sheer problem for the CRM to find which one is most up-to-date or which data in the software the CRM system will utilize to create and deliver a personalized message to the prospects, leads or customers.

Because email personalization relies on the data accuracy of your best small business CRM platform, duplicate records will completely jeopardize the efficiency of your system. Duplicate records mostly occur when someone completes your form multiple times but place different information, or when someone enters a new contact manually and unintentionally enters different data into the CRM database.

For example, if you have two contacts for ‘Stephen Smith’, but one has the name listed as ‘Stephn Smith’, it is possible that the person will receive a personalized email to “Stephn” rather than ‘Stephen’, which will no doubt create a bad impression for your company.

• Delete unresponsive contacts

Always keep your database clean of unresponsive contacts. This means, those unresponsive contacts have either got them unsubscribed from receiving your email or your emails are bouncing, both of which indicate that they do not want to deal with your brand and hence they must be immediately purged out from the database of your CRM system. Deleting unresponsive contacts from your CRM database will ensure that your emails are going to live email accounts, which in turn also improves the accuracy of your email tracking and reporting functionality of the CRM.

• Track lead source

Lastly, you need to monitor where the leads in your CRM database are coming from, as it will allow you to sharpen your marketing strategies while engaging them during the lead nurturing processes.

Tracking the source of the leads in your easy to use CRM platform, will help you to keep strategies tightly organized around whom each lead are, where they came from, and what their objectives were with your business.

Conclusion

Easy to use CRM technology allows businesses to do much more with fewer resources. It helps you to maintain a much more personal relationship with customers and prospects. Nevertheless, all these factors depend on having a clean CRM database , since if personalized communications go to the wrong people and tell them wrong things, it will ultimately hurt the reputation of your organization, and set in motion a wave of harmful consequences that will keep coming like a tide that you just cannot escape.