What are duplicate records and why do they matter?
While working in your marketing automation platform, you might have encountered the issue of duplicate records in your database. In some cases, duplicate records are created from your connected CRM system. Certain processes in the CRM intentionally (or unintentionally) create duplicate records to support the sales process, such as creating a new contact based on the lead, rather than converting the lead to a contact. This means that you have two or more records with the same email address but different data. This can cause a lot of problems for your marketing and sales activities, as well as your customer experience. In this blog post, we will explain how duplicate records can impact your nurture campaigns, your general marketing and sales performance, and your action plan to prevent or reduce duplicate creation.
How duplicate records affect your nurture campaigns
Nurture campaigns are designed to engage and educate your leads until they are ready to make a purchase decision. To prevent leads from receiving further nurture emails in the nurture campaign, the trigger logic in the marketing automation platform relies on certain data points. However, if sales qualify a lead that is currently in a nurture stream and create a new contact instead of converting the lead , a duplicate record is created in the marketing automation platform. The problem is that the marketing automation software only tracks the data changes on the original record that was added to the nurture campaign, not the new contact. This means that the original lead will continue to receive nurture emails, even if they have already bought your product or service. This can create a poor customer experience and damage your brand reputation.
How duplicate records affect your general marketing and sales performance
Besides hurting your nurture campaigns, duplicate records can also have other negative impacts on your marketing and sales activities, such as:
- Activities such as email send-outs, scoring, form fill-outs, and web activity can be tracked on a different duplicate record than the one viewed by sales, thus reducing the accuracy and reliability of your data.
- CRM and other third-party tools could be updating the data on a duplicate, which might not be the one used by the marketing automation system. This can result in sending emails with outdated or incorrect information.
- Lead data from the marketing automation platform will give the sales team incomplete or misleading information on the latest marketing touchpoints and journey of the leads, as data can be divided between duplicates.
- Reporting can be distorted by duplicates, as they can inflate the total number of leads, skew the ROI reporting, and complicate the revenue cycle reporting.
- “Marketing Suspended”, “Email Invalid” and “Blacklisted” statuses are not kept in sync and could have different values across duplicates. This can affect your email deliverability and compliance.
- Licence cost – if your marketing automation platform licence cost is based on the number of records in your database. Having duplicates means that you are paying more than you need to.
How to prevent or reduce duplicate creation
The best way to deal with duplicate records is to avoid creating them in the first place. This requires a close collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Here are some steps that you can take to limit duplicate creation in your CRM and marketing automation platform:
- Access to the CRM – You need to have access to the CRM to be able to identify and fix duplicate records. You also need to understand how the system works and how it interacts with your marketing automation platform.
- Fully assess the impact in the CRM and other dependent business processes – Before you make any changes to your CRM settings or workflows, you need to evaluate how they will affect your other business processes and systems. You don't want to break something that is working well or create new problems.
- To fully discover how and when duplicate records are created, you need to analyse your data and processes to find out the root causes of duplicate creation. For example, you can use reports or tools like DemandTools to identify and monitor duplicate records.
- Activating contact relation to multiple accounts. This is a CRM feature that allows you to associate a contact with more than one account. This can help you avoid creating duplicates when you need to track a contact's relationship with multiple accounts.
- Enabling de-duplicate rules on lead and contact – This is another CRM feature that allows you to prevent or warn users when they are creating or editing a lead or contact that has a duplicate. On the lead object, we recommend only informing about an existing duplicate record, while on contact we recommend enforcing the rule, thus stopping the creation of one.
- Create tasks on contacts/leads instead of creating new contacts and leads which result in duplicates – This is a best practice that can help you keep your data clean and consistent. Instead of creating a new record for every interaction or activity, you can create a task on the existing record and update the data accordingly.
- Add an integration layer between the marketing automation system and the CRM that can clean and process the data before pushing the updated data. This is something we at Exelement can offer with our integration as a platform (iPaaS) solution SyncCloud.
- Be mindful of possible duplicates being created when buying lists, using integrations or uploading lists from e.g., events. This is a common source of duplicate creation, especially if you are not using the marketing automation to import your lists.
Conclusion
Duplicate records in your marketing automation platform are a common problem to have, and they can have a significant impact on your marketing and sales performance, as well as your customer experience. By following the steps outlined in this blog post, you can prevent or reduce duplicate creation and improve your data quality and accuracy. If you need help with managing your database, contact us to learn more about our approach and how we work with our clients to maintain good data hygiene.
