In this two-part blog series I’ll cover the reasons why you should implement a contact washing machine—and how to actually build one.

 

A contact washing machine (CWM) is a powerful tool: It is an automated program or series of connected automated tasks that help normalize data and maintain a clean contact database. When implemented thoughtfully, it gives an organization the ability to utilize meaningful marketing efforts like lead scoring, advanced segmentation, and dynamic content. 

Why you should create a CWM

Before you begin considering investing in a CWM you must determine if there is a direct business need. Outline use cases and business outcomes outside of the technical specifications to be sure that a CWM will add value. There are several reasons why you may want to clean up your database, beyond just wanting a neat contact list.

Here are five ways to leverage a contact washing machine in your organization:

1. Reporting
   
   If you are unable to create meaningful reports due to disparate field values, a CWM can serve as a great solution. For example, you can report on leads or contacts by state, which will help you make decisions on where to invest in your lead generation efforts. If you find that your state field includes both abbreviations and full spellings, this report could be difficult to run, affecting your geographical data. 
2. Segmentation
   
   CWMs are often implemented as part of strategic persona-based campaigns. These personas will drive the way you segment your database and interact with your clients or prospects with the goal of increasing engagement and driving more sales.
   
   
   
   “Title” is a common field in persona segmentation that requires clean-up. In lead generation forms, “title” tends to be a text field, allowing a prospect to type anything. This can result in a wide variation of entries, spelling mistakes, and junk data.
   
   
   
   Trying to segment based on title can be time consuming. Imagine you have an event where you’d like to invite all Chief Marketing Officers. In this scenario you would have to consider “CMO,” “Chief Marketing Officer,” “C-Level Marketing,” “C-Mktg,” as well as any misspellings.To help solve for this, marketers without a CWM sometimes use picklists in place of text fields. The problem here is that decreased flexibility in form fields can negatively impact your conversion rate. A contact washing machine allows you to capture the benefits of form flexibility without the pains of bad data. 
3. Dynamic Content
   
   If you have implemented nurturing campaigns, you understand the importance of dynamic content. Dynamic content allows you to run email campaigns with different content based on data points in your system. This allows you not only to better engage with prospects, but also operationalize your marketing and decrease the effort it takes to implement an email campaign. For example, an email campaign based on geography could use just one email, with content that changes based on your country.   
4. Lead Scoring
   
   It can be very difficult to score leads without normalized fields. This is especially true for a lead’s profile score. Profile fields are often data points like state or country, title or role, company size or industry.There may be a hot lead that is not being passed to sales because the “industry” has been misspelled. This can result in a lead going untouched or not responded to in a timely manner, leaving potential business on the table.
5. Routing
   
   Another reason for implementing a CWM is to properly route leads. You’ve already put in the hard work sending targeted messaging to your prospects, tracking their digital body language and pushing them through the funnel. When a lead finally hits your scoring threshold, or raises their hand via a high value form-fill, you’ll want them to be routed to the correct sales team or person. Depending on how those teams are structured, this routing could rely on contact data. If a lead is routed based on company size, and the values are entered in different formats; either written, with commas or by ranges it could complicate your routing rules and leads may fall through the cracks.
   
   
   
   Imagine inserting a value a company size of 5,000 employees. It could be in various formats—five thousand, five-thousand, 5,000, 5000, 5000-6000, 5k, 5 thousand. You may want to take those raw values and standardize or even fit into ranges. 

A contact washing machine is a worthwhile initiative to have on your 2014 roadmap—but only if it leads to a healthier pipeline. The goal should never be to have clean data, but rather to take action once that data is clean. Use a contact washing machine to sharpen your marketing efforts and drive more revenue.

Stay tuned for part two of this blog series, where we’ll discuss how to build a CWM in your organization.

Looking to beef up your marketing efforts past a CWM implementation? See how the top marketing departments are innovating in our free guide, The Three Pillars of Modern, Digital Marketing.