Why purging your client database is so important

In order to compile accurate clients lists for targeting advertising, you need a perfectly well-organized database of customers. This condition is indispensable for account-based marketing and personalized approach to B2B clients. It is also crucial for personal marketing and is a powerful tool for getting rid of the uninterested audience. 

Divide your customers into two groups: the very important ones that bring the most of your company profits, and the less important ones that only bring random small sales, which make little difference to your profits. 

Your clients can be classed as:

First of all, focus on the unprofitable and unpromising clients that require lots of time and effort without bringing much profits.

Then pay your attention to the ones who no longer need your product/service because they got their problem solved or found a better alternative. 

Then go the terrorists. Little money — but a huge pain in the... whole of your company. 

Now take a quick look at your "restless souls": they are in perpetual quest for additional perks. You can keep them — as long as none of your competitors have a better offer.

In time, any database tends to accumulate duplicate entries, that must be found and destroyed. They come out occasionally and for various reasons: for instance, a client had filled an online form and then called the company, thus prompting duplicate records to emerge. This bug is something you can certainly live with, but it is bound to cause quite a lot of inconvenience, such as recurring calls and emails to one destination, when launching a campaign. The bug can also incur inaccurate statistics on your clients/products database: for instance, showing 1000 entries instead of the real 865, excluding duplicates. 

Databases are bound to be intricate. People have different habits of filling data: for example, a phone number could be registered as +442079460695 or 02079460695; a comma or even an excessive gap can make the crucial difference. Alternatively, clients could move and change their address, email, phone number, name, payment details and even sphere of business. In addition, every mailing service has a rating feature. When your database is teeming with mistakes and your mail recipients are complaining of spam, the rating is going down and you can easily end up being blacklisted by your mail provider.

Here are some tips on how to keep your clients' data always fresh and updated:

- comb your client database regularly: add the information in a timely manner and a unified format;

- look out for irrelevant email and residential addresses and phone numbers: eliminate duplicates in order to prevent reoccurring emails and calls to one customer; 

- merge all the client data from Excel and other different sources into a consolidated database and rectify the mistakes in it: mind that online forms can contain typos. 

Small databases of less than 500 entries can be updated manually. Anything that is bigger requires automatic processing, which is time-saving and minimizing the human error. 

For example, you are planning an advertising campaign involving calls and emails to clients. We strongly recommend you to update your client database prior to launching the campaign: this will save you a lot of money and effort. 

In order to purge your database quickly and efficiently, you can either resort to shamans, or to APRO CRM duplicates search. When activated, this application displays the number of potentially duplicate contacts, objects or any other elements considered identical by the system:

Each time new data is registered in the CRM, the system compares it to the existing entries. After that, you can access the duplicate entries in the application and merge them in order to get rid of all excessive copies:

By default, the CRM recognizes entries as duplicate, if their phone numbers coincide but you can always change filters and have the system analyze client's name and last name, company name or payment details, etc.:

It is not always crucial to fight for each and every client. You should learn to let some of them go: you'd sometimes rather close 3-5 deals with determined customers, than spend the same (or even more) time and effort persuading a hesitating one. 

Clients' activity is best illustrated by system analytics and sales funnels, which can also help you monitor the shifts of deal stages during a certain time period, the duration of certain stages, and average speed of stage shifts. Sales funnels explicitly show, where exactly your clients got stuck or slipped off the funnel altogether.

APRO CRM reports help you segment your clients and products applying various metrics. Reports also show you for how long your clients get stuck on a certain stage, so that you could contact them and reveal the reasons for their uncertainty. This can help you take these clients to the next stage of your sales funnel, or leave the deal until there is a better time to give it another try. If the contradictions are insoluble, you can either "freeze" the contact and set a reminder about it, or remove it from your database.

In APRO CRM you can select among a number of client statuses: from "barely active" up to "ready to purchase". Each client status implies certain commercial offers and warming-up strategies. 

Make sweeping the database your habit.

Before a lead turns to your regular customer, you need to do loads of hard work to get and keep the client interested and take the deal down the sales funnel. That is what makes revealing random and unpromising clients so important — they only steal your time and effort, taking your efficiency down.