How to be smarter with customer data audits

Each year, the data that marketing teams hold on their customers will degrade by around 10 – 20%. This is simply because approximately 1% of the population will die, 10% will move house, and email addresses and phone numbers will inevitably change. Not all data will take the same amount of time to degrade. For example, details on customer segments, products or customer type will all deteriorate at different rates. The age of the data plays a part too. If it is over 3 years old then 30% of customers will have moved, so the entire database essentially changes address every 10 years. It’s also not entirely equal. Data provided by existing customers may be more valuable to a business than that held against prospective customers, and this may vary between marketing campaigns. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect this May, it has never been more critical to keep data clean. Article 5 of the regulation states “every reasonable step…” must be taken to fix inaccurate data, but how can you know what to fix if you haven’t properly audited?