How Clean Is Your Data, Why Care?

How would you like an easy way to grab 20% more customers?

How clean is the data in your DMS or CRM? Does it even really matter? The simple answer is, YES. The solution is also a simple one-word answer "training". Training our team and our customers on why it is so important to make sure you have the correct contact information in your systems.

As part of our onboarding process we "clean" DMS data for our customers. Each time we do it amazes me how much bad data is in the data. On average we see over 20% of the data in a dealer's DMS is "bad" data.

You might say, "Stephen, what does that even really matter...." Well, think about just this one. You spent all that money gaining a customer, then your team put in bad data for that customer, so 20% of the people you paid to get as customers are just gone after the sale because you can't communicate with them properly. That means, not getting them back in for service or for selling them another car because someone on the team put in "noemail@gmail.com" for the email address of that customer for some reason. That is just one small example, I can go through 10 of them.

Another big one is "bounce rates". If you are doing a marketing blast to your customer base and over 20% of the emails you have are made up you are going to have a HUGE bounce rate. You might ask, "why does that matter? Just means fake emails aren't getting our emails, so what?" Well, if that happens servers will start to block mail from. If you get tags with high bounce rates companies like google, yahoo, and other email providers will block your mail and send it directly to spam. So all the other 80% of your emails that are correct will not be getting the messages you want them to.

I think part of the problem stems from our industry pounding the importance of gathering emails. The importance of "gathering" but not explaining the "why". Team members know they have to "get an email" address in the system to do anything but may not be able to actually get the email from the customers, just wing it and put something in the system to get the task done that they are graded on.

Here are a couple of quick steps you can take to help fix this issue: