Your CRM database (customer relationship management) holds a host of valued information for your business, from prospects to faithful customers and more.

The data within helps you increase prospect conversions, enhance your sales, and ensure customer satisfaction. With that in mind, you can understand why maintaining your CRM is crucial to your business and your overall success. 

Keeping your CRM database clean and up to date allows you to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and provide accurate information for your sales staff, customer service professionals, customers, clients, and stakeholders.

Here, the team at Perxi shares the best ways to maintain your CRM database:

Maintaining Your CRM Database

Ensuring a well-maintained CRM database sets your business up for growth and success. A clean and maintained CRM system provides accurate, up-to-date data required by your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to execute their duties effectively and improve the company’s bottom line. 

Let’s explore the best way to maintain your CRM database:

Enter Your Data in Real Time. 

Everyone has the best intentions, namely, to enter data when it is fresh in their minds. The problem is situations can arise and alter those intentions. To ensure the accuracy of your data and the effectiveness of your CRM, enter your data in real time while the information is fresh and clear and you are more likely to avoid leaving out crucial information. 

Ensure Data is Properly Formatted. 

Equally important to entering data in real time is ensuring the data entered is properly formatted. When data is imported incorrectly, problems can arise in the future and make it more difficult to maintain your CRM database. The most commonly used representation for data is Excel spreadsheets. If your Excel files and your CRM do not have matching data fields, valuable data can be excluded. This can be avoided by ensuring your team utilizes unified formats and import procedures.  

Import Essential Data. 

With increased data points comes increased inaccuracies and errors. The only data which should be imported is essential data that is complete and accurate. Determine the essential data which helps your teams to function effectively and efficiently and ensure that data is imported in an organized, methodical manner. Doing so means accurate reliable data and CRM that is more easily maintained and updated.  

Avoid Partial or Incomplete Contact Records. 

A complementary step to essential data, avoiding partial or incomplete contact records requires the development of essential data fields for your company. Determining essential fields for your company and ensuring all the data deemed essential is collected and imported to your CRM is crucial. Limit the data collected to crucial information, not overzealous information gathering that your customers and clients aren’t likely enter anyway.

Validate Phone Numbers and Email Addresses on Lead Forms. 

CRMs allow for validation measures on phone and email fields, permitting your to instantly verify the phone number and email address entered is genuine and active. Because contact information is an invaluable tool for your business’s success, garnering relevant data is crucial. Bots can spam your CRM system and skew your data, much like web users who leave invalid email addresses and phone numbers which these validation, security measures can thwart. Add reCAPTCHA to your forms to help you avoid bots.

Eliminate Contacts who are Unresponsive. 

Keeping your CRM database cleared of unresponsive contacts (those who have bounced back or unsubscribed) will help you ensure you are communicating with live email addresses. Doing so improves your accuracy and reporting as well as increasing your sales forces chances for success.

Check for Duplicate Contact Records. 

Much like unresponsive contacts, duplicate contacts are detrimental to your marketing efforts. Not only are duplicate contacts frustrating to your sales team, they can annoy your prospect lowering the potential for conversion. On top of that, email personalization is dependent on reliable CRM data, which means duplicates can make a poor first impression on your prospects. Regular audits of your contact list data can remove duplicates and give you a clean, maintained CRM system.

Track Lead Sources. 

You need to know where your leads originate whether that is paid list imports or organically generated from search, understanding the sources can help you better engage those prospects. If your prospect opted in, the communication will be decidedly different than someone who was on a purchased list. Tracking your lead sources will guide your marketing and sales team to engage those prospects more effectively.