What Is Data Cleansing and Why Does It Matter?

In today's business world data has become the most important asset for practically every organisation. If your customer database is left idle for a long time, the information becomes outdated and redundant. Your company needs accurate, relevant data in order to develop successful initiatives. And here is why a data cleaning tool may help you.

What is Data Cleansing?

Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process that fixes or removes incorrect, corrupted, duplicate or incomplete data within a dataset. Even if the data is right, outcomes and algorithms are untrustworthy if the data is inaccurate. Because the methods will differ from dataset to dataset, there is no one-size-fits-all way to prescribe the exact steps in the data cleansing process. However, it is critical to create a template for your data cleansing procedure so you can be sure you are doing it correctly every time.

Why Do You Need to Cleanse Your Database?

According to MarketingSherpa, about 25 to 30% of data in a database becomes inaccurate or loses relevance every year. This could result in a significant waste of your budget. As a result, it is critical for businesses to have accurate and up-to-date information about their customers. There are numerous reasons why you need to cleanse your customers’ data. Here are some:

To help figure out inactive and unresponsive contacts within the current database.
To save time and money that would be otherwise wasted if you ran a campaign with out-of-date data.
To help access accurate data.

To reach the right audiences for maximum responses.

Error-free data in today's world is paramount as most businesses rely on it for business growth. If your database is left unattended for a long time, you may experience the following negative consequences:

Data decay will lead to about 25 per cent loss of your database within a year
Irrelevant data equals wastage of time and money on prospects who are not even getting your message
High bounce rates

What Are the Benefits of Data Cleansing?

1. Better decision making

Customer data is the core of any business's reasonable and successful decision-making. An average B2B company's data grows every twelve to eighteen months, while the information may appear to be accurate at first, errors can occur at any time. However, many businesses do not place a high priority on data quality control.

In order to make good decisions, you need good data and reliable information. You can benefit from stronger analytics as well as expanded business intelligence with clean data, which leads to better decision-making.

2. Improve customer acquisition efforts

Cleansing data helps in boosting the efficiency of customer acquisition efforts. This is because data cleansing can support businesses in creating a more efficient customer list with accurate data. Regular data quality processes can ensure that marketing initiatives are effective by ensuring that business data is clean, up-to-date, and accurate. Furthermore, data cleansing can aid in the seamless management of multi-channel customer data.

3. Increase productivity

Businesses may feel at ease that their employees are being productive with their working hours if they have a clean, well-maintained database. It can also aid in stopping your employees from marketing to leads who have duplicate information. When your employees work with clean data, their productivity and efficiency skyrocket. Clean data also helps to reduce fraud risks since staff have access to reliable customer data when refunds or payments are made.

4. Increase in revenue

Organisations may significantly improve their response rates by trying to improve the accurateness of their data, which leads to increased revenue. Bounce rates can be considerably reduced with the use of reliable data. If you ever need to directly communicate promotions or sensitive information to a client, having accurate data on hand can help you reach them swiftly and easily. Data cleansing aids in the effective elimination of duplicate data. Furthermore, erroneous data might waste your organisation's resources by requiring you to spend twice as much on a particular customer.

Common Data Cleansing Tools

You need the most accurate data if you want the greatest results. That means your data must be updated, accurate, and correct. Using one of the best data cleansing programs can help you.

Here is a list of some popular data cleansing tools and their keys benefits

1. Integrate.io:

Integrate.io is an advanced data pipeline platform that offers ETL, ELT, and replication functionality. You can set up these functions with a no-code graphic interface.

Key benefits of Integrate.io:

No-code user-friendly interface
Cleans and masks data before it goes to data warehouses
Cloud-based

2. Tibco Clarity:

Tibco Clarity is a dedicated platform for interactive data cleansing. It uses a visual interface that allows you to streamline data quality improvements, data discovery, and data transformation.

Key benefits of Tibco Clarity:

Visual data cleansing interface
Data visualisations

Rules-based validation

3. DemandTools:

DemandTools is a data quality suite designed to help organizations improve their data. This solution works best on narrow data cleansing use cases.

Key benefits of DemandTools:

Specialised for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Salesforce CRM data cleansing

Provides data cleansing, discovery, and maintenance

4. RingLead:

RingLead is a comprehensive data orchestration platform. It is an end-to-end solution for CRM and marketing automation data, rather than a dedicated data cleaning tool.

Key benefits of RingLead:

A comprehensive data orchestration platform

Specialised in CRM and marketing automation data

5. Melissa Clean Suite:

Melissa Clean Suite is a data cleaning application that improves data quality in many leading CRM and ERP platforms. Indeed, its wide integration with other software makes it one of the top data cleansing tools.

Key benefits of Melissa Clean Suite

Works with many CRM and ERP platforms

Dedicated data cleansing application

6. dataBelt:

DataBelt is an all-in-one solution leveraging modern technologies, namely machine learning and robotic processing, to support companies to overcome challenges associated with data governance.

Key benefits of dataBelt:

Search for any data, structured or unstructured
Fully managed end to end GDPR and data protection
Locate, Identify, Interrogate and Classify your databases with dataBelt® for GDPR clarity

To learn more about dataBelt, how this module can help your organisation streamline both your data and your business processes, download our brochure today!

What Is Data Cleansing and Why Does It Matter?