What is Bad Data or Dirty Data and how can it affect company’s performance? One of the fundamental currencies that powers the commercial world is data. Dealing with data, whether it be sales statistics or stock patterns, is a significant element of running a business.

Do you aware that some data flaws that happen frequently force many organizations to stop growing? These flaws have a negative impact on customer experience, marketing initiatives, and workflows. Even legal issues may result from it.

What do we however call this? These are recognized as inaccurate or soiled data. An inaccurate set of information known as bad data or filthy data includes missing data, incorrect information, unsuitable information, non-conforming information, duplicate information, and poor entries (misspells, typos, variations in spelling, format, etc). Today, in this article, we’ll provide what actually bad data is, how to prevent this, consequences of bad data.

What is Bad Data or Dirty Data or Poor Data?

Let’s first define what genuinely terrible data is before moving on to a thorough explanation. Data that is flawed in some way is referred to as dirty data or filthy data. It may be old, unsecured, incomplete, inaccurate, or inconsistent, or it may contain duplicates. Misspelled addresses, blank fields, old phone numbers, and duplicate client records are a few examples of dirty data.

The phrase “bad data” may appear unclear at first because organizations are frequently advised to avoid using it yet are frequently unsure of what it entails.

Data that is lacking essential components, is irrelevant for the purposes for which it will be utilized, duplicated, improperly assembled, and other issues are examples of bad data. A company’s performance can be greatly impacted by the use of faulty data, and in certain situations, the results might be completely disastrous.

Businesses are frequently warned about their data management and gathering procedures since they might be just as crucial as the actual goods or services that are advertised to the general public.

How data gets dirty?

When data is entered, stored, or used wrongly, it might become contaminated. While human error or a lack of data entry standardization norms are frequently to blame, technical problems can sometimes result in inaccurate data.

Ways to determine the Bad, Poor Data

We are aware of what truly bad data is. Nowadays, firms frequently fail to notice that their data has turned bad. It can become more and more difficult for brands to precisely target their customers due to bad data. It can result in incomplete knowledge about them and make it difficult to predict who will respond best to your marketing efforts and sales pitch. As a result, organizations need to pay particular attention to how to enhance data quality and what to do if it’s subpar.

To help you identify your faulty data, we have included a list below –

Missing or Inaccurate data. Your sales team might experience specific difficulties with inaccurate or missing data. For instance, you might discover two entries for a single prospect, incomplete contact details for a lead, or false information about the lead’s employer.

Data can occasionally be the result of data entry errors, but it can also come from outdated or faulty data that has been uploaded online.

You should approach the topic from a variety of angles in order to solve these issues.

1. Ensure that everyone in the company is aware of the potential issues caused by incorrect data. Ensure that everyone has received training on the optimal data entry techniques for the company.
2. Make sure the sources you use to acquire information on leads are reliable and accurate.
3. Spend some time cleaning the data. Give them the time they need to routinely go through their data, update it as necessary, remove duplicates, or generally clean up inaccurate or useless information.

Irrelevant information: You must ensure that the data you obtain are pertinent as you gather them. Even if you have a tonne of data about prospects that precisely identifies your lead, if it doesn’t allow you to comprehend their problems and find solutions for them, it is of no use to you.

Check the relevance of the information you have. Remove useless information, and don’t spend extra time gathering it. Consider the information that can help you service your consumers more effectively.

Unreliable information: Additionally, data can occasionally come from sources that you shouldn’t trust. On occasion, people publish false information online. Other times, firms with a blatant bias deliver the findings of surveys or market research. It is impossible to rely on the information from these sources to make business judgments.

As you gather data, be sure to verify the sources and make sure they will deliver reliable information in order to weed out this type of outlier data.

Vanity data: Vanity data is used to describe information that could make a company look nice but does not actually support marketing, sales, or consumer interaction.

Make sure to properly plan out KPIs that match your marketing goal to prevent wasting time and dollars collecting vanity data. Know who you want your campaigns to reach, and utilize that knowledge to create KPIs that will direct your business and provide quick returns.

Inaccurate targeting of leads and potential customers by brands can sabotage marketing and sales efforts. Take into account the advice for each of these categories of inaccurate data to keep your data banks clean and productive, which will aid in consumer targeting and acquisition.

Consequences of Bad Data or Dirty Data

Bad or filthy data can have a number of negative effects on your company’s operations if it is not detected in time. But what are the effects of this? How will it impact your company? Yes, as was already established, bad or filthy data can have an impact on your business. Following are a few outcomes that can result from inaccurate data:

Ineffective Marketing Campaigns

Inaccurate information about your intended clients distorts your marketing attempts to reach the proper demographic.

Inaccurate data gives you wrong signals of your target market, which badly affects your marketing efforts and sales campaigns. Which can lead to huge losses. Thus, correct and accurate data is essential for the success of any marketing strategy, particularly email advertising.

Poor Customer Experience

Poor customer experience caused by inaccurate data will cause you to lose out on worthwhile prospects and fail to keep your present clients.

The modern consumer has more influence than ever over their purchasing process. They desire friction-less interactions when they are considering making a purchase from your business. The success of these exchanges depends on accurate data.

Damaged Brand Reputation

Bad data can badly damage your company’s reputation and goodwill. Inaccurate data can harm your company’s reputation in many ways like loss of customers, heavy losses and create bad name for your company in the market.

Customers don’t just leave your business, product or services when they have a bad experience in today’s hyper-connected environment. This can also gives you bad word of mouth publicity, as customers may share their bad experiences and information with their friends, family, and coworkers. Which eventually result in loss of customers.

Misinformed Decision-Making

When inaccurate data taints your sales and marketing KPIs and reporting, it can seriously harm your company.

Executives and significant stakeholders used instinct and intuition in the past to make crucial long-term business choices. Clean data now give decision-makers the resources they require for accurate and thorough reporting.

Misaligned Sales and Marketing Teams

Dirty data makes it difficult for marketing and sales to align, and one of the first activities to suffer is lead generation.

This implies that your marketing staff will eventually deliver sales low-quality leads. As the two departments’ connection deteriorates over time, there are fewer conversions and fewer leads coming in.

Your teams need reliable data so that marketing can deliver sales the most qualified, close-ready leads.

A Slower Sales Cycle

Throughout the sales cycle, your inaccurate data will produce obstacles. Poor lead management is one example of this, with salespeople engaging high-quality prospects too late or occasionally not at all.

This hinders the progression of leads through the sales process. And as a result, opportunities are lost and good leads turn bad.

Your teams create quicker, more effective sales processes with constant data hygiene, ensuring that every lead touch point is fantastic.

How to clean Bad Data?

We have given an overview of how to clean bad data with the 8 effective data cleaning techniques:

• Remove duplicates
• Remove irrelevant data
• Standardize capitalization
• Convert data type
• Clear formatting
• Fix errors
• Language Translation
• Handle missing value

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the side effects of bad data?

If you keep making mistakes, your firm will suffer, and you could lose money. A decline in productivity might result from bad data in addition to poor choices and issues. From managers to customer support, marketing, and sales, everyone uses the same data.

Is raw data dirty data?

“Dirty data” refers to raw data that has not yet been sorted or combined in order to work with any business intelligence tools designed for analysis.

Where does bad data come from?

Human Error.

Human error is one of the most frequent reasons for bad data quality; it usually happens when data entry procedures are not standardized or when staff members manually enter information into spreadsheets. The likelihood of errors is increased in both situations.

What are the risks of bad-quality data?

6 risks of low-quality data

• Reduced efficiency.
• Missed leads.
• Lost revenue.
• Reputational damage.
• Inaccurate analyses.
• Lack of compliance.

You may also like: How can you process your data from dirty to clean? And, what should after that?