With over 2.4 billion people surfing the Internet today, we have more data than ever at our fingertips, and as powerful as this can be for our sales teams, these large databases of consumer information can quickly become outdated.
On average, online data erodes at about 5% per month, and email databases specifically degrade at a rate of about 22.5% each year.
Data decay is a costly problem that many companies face when prospecting for eCommerce clients. Here’s why it happens and how it could be affecting your bottom line.
Why It Happens
First of all, data decay is unavoidable. It’s natural. Data inaccuracies happen to every database in every industry for all sorts of different reasons.
These stats pretty much sum up why it’s impossible to keep all of your etailer prospecting data 100% up-to-date:
- 30% of people change jobs annually
- 66% of people’s titles and/or job function change annually
- 43% of people’s phone numbers change annually
- 34% of companies change their name annually
- 37% of email addresses change annually
Without routinely making note of these kinds of changes in your etailer data, decay can become a huge problem that shaves dollars off of your profit margin.
How It Affects Your Bottom Line
Bad data affects many different aspects of selling.
In terms of prospecting, losing contact with just one person might result in losing contact what that organization as a whole. Bad data definitely affects communication between the sales team and their etailer prospects.
It can also be costly. Really costly.
50% of IT budgets are spent on data rehabilitation each year, which is only a small chunk of the $611 billion U.S. businesses waste annually because of bad data.
For your company, it’s important to remember the 1-10-100 rule—the longer you let a rotten apple remain in your data the more expensive it becomes to fix.
Bad data is a big problem, so make sure you’re taking steps to routinely clear out junky records and update your etailer prospect information.
Are you interested in leveraging more data to increase sales? See how etailinsights can bolster your lead generation efforts!