Data Quality: a direct and systemic impact on lead generation and conversion

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Few business levers have such a decisive and, above all, systemic impact on performance as data quality. In this article, Data Enso explores the decisive role of Data Quality in lead generation and the conversion of prospects into customers.

Data Quality: what are we talking about?

Data Quality is a characteristic or condition that reflects the degree of accuracy, completeness, consistency, relevance and reliability of data in a business context.

As Gartner explains, 65% of organizations will have successfully migrated from an intuition-based decision-making process to a 100% data-driven process by 2026. The stakes for Data Quality are therefore enormous: basing decisions on unreliable data means making biased decisions that will potentially impact company performance in the broadest sense.

To put it simply, good quality data is data that is correct, meaningful, up to date, useful and usable in the company's specific context. Several elements need to be taken into account here:

     

      • Accuracy: accurate data is data that corresponds to reality. An e-mail address will be considered accurate only if it is correctly formatted, valid and belongs to the person indicated.

      • Completeness: are all the required data present? With a customer database, you need to have all the information you need to take action (name, email, postal address, etc.). The action may consist of an emailing tactic, the sending of a postal letter, a telesales call, and so on.

      • Consistency: this refers to the uniformity of data collected and stored in different systems. For example, a customer's address must be the same in all the company's systems.

      • Relevance: this means matching data to real business needs. Relevant data helps to make accurate and timely decisions. Irrelevant data may be accurate, but it's not useful. It weighs down files and needlessly complicates analysis.

      • Reliability: this criterion refers to the quality of the source of the data collected.

    Data Quality is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means of improving decision-making and achieving business objectives. A company with a high-quality database can optimize its marketing campaign KPIs, boost lead generation and maximize conversion rates, as we'll see below.

    Data Quality, lead generation and conversion: a direct and decisive impact

    Lead generation is an essential pillar of marketing and sales performance, and its results are directly conditioned by the quality of the data collected.

    The challenge begins with the very first interaction with a potential prospect in an Inbound strategy, for example via a form on a Landing Page offering a Lead Magnet (white paper, for example). Even the smallest error can prevent you from launching future communications to transform this lead into a customer:

       

        • Lead frustration: a visitor lands on your landing page to download valuable content. They're ready to give you their contact details. If the email address they enter is wrong, they'll never receive the promised content, and you lose a lead because they can't be reached. The lead is frustrated, your reputation is damaged (broken promise) and your database receives the wrong "entry". Your next e-mailing will include an e-mail address that doesn't exist, damaging the reputation of your domain name.

        • Using disposable or ephemeral email: Data Quality isn't just about accuracy. It's also about usefulness and actionability. A lead who uses a disposable email address to download content has delivered accurate data, but will be of no use to your marketing campaigns. Here again, sending emails to disposable addresses will affect the reputation of your domain name and threaten the reach and deliverability of your future communications.

        • Lead Nurturing: not all leads are ready to make a purchase. That's why you need to "nurture" them to move them along the sales path... a lever that becomes inoperative with invalid e-mail addresses.

        • Personalization problems Personalization problems: errors in the first name, for example, can damage the experience. If the lead makes a typo on their first name in the form, your automated lead nurturing process will trigger emails with the wrong first name, which can offend and frustrate the lead in question.

        • Audience segmentation: Data Quality has a direct impact on the segmentation of your audiences for your email campaigns, social network advertising, etc. Effective segmentation presupposes detailed knowledge of your prospects: company size, sector of activity, position, etc. Incorrect data will inevitably alter the accuracy of your segmentation, and therefore the relevance of the messages delivered to each segment and, by construction, conversion.

      Finally, Data Quality will condition the accuracy of lead value estimation, which in turn influences the maximum cost you're willing to pay for lead acquisition. For example, you might assign a higher value to a lead from a large company than to a very small one, or to a lead in a decision-making position than to a lead in an executive position. If your data on the size of the company or the position of the prospect is inaccurate, your assessment of the lead's value, and therefore of what you're willing to pay for its acquisition, will be wrong.

      As a result, you run the risk of making marketing spend decisions based on incorrect data, which can affect the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts and thus your ROI.

      Data Enso for Data capital at the service of lead generation

      What if you could finally turn your Data capital into a real sales performance gas pedal? That's our promise at Data Enso. We've developed an arsenal of powerful, intuitive and GDPR-compliant solutions to optimize lead generation and customer acquisition.

      Our tools enable you to ensure the quality of the data entered by your prospects on online forms (via API) and to make your existing databases more reliable (Batch). Our EnsoEmail tool, for example, guarantees a 99% reliability rate!

      Interested? Request your free test today!

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