2012 is the year of clean data for ReadyTalk.  If you think of your marketing campaigns and processes as the engine of your demand generation car, you can think of clean data as the motor oil. If you put in poor quality oil or no oil at all, your million dollar engine will not perform to standard no matter how hard you press the pedal.

There are really three stages to cleaning your database. Assessing the current state of your database, cleaning/appending  current data and then looking at all your inputs and standardizing those. Within each of these steps there are multiple stages, but that is it at a high level.

Let’s look at the first phase assessing the current state of your database. First, you need to decide which contact fields are critical to your marketing and sales efforts. These are the fields you lead score, fields that relate to your ideal customer profile and fields that impact deliverability.  You can assess these fields in a couple of different reports.

Total Marketing Reach:  # of contacts with a valid email or phone – (bounce backs + unsubscribed)

Total Email Reach: # of contacts with valid email – (bounce backs + unsubscribed)

Profile Completeness:  % complete of your marketing critical fields in your DB. This report (shown below) gives you a view of your database and what fields need the most work.

Armed with these reports you can begin to assess the health of  your database as it relates to your marketing efforts.

As the senior demand generation manager at ReadyTalk, Mike helps manage and execute ReadyTalk’s demand generation programs, which include email, online advertising, telemarketing and tradeshows. He also oversees ReadyTalk’s lead management process and marketing funnel by using Eloqua and Salesforce.com to automate ReadyTalk’s nurturing programs and lead follow-up.