Data governance issues are a data quality problem

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In today’s rapidly evolving marketing landscape, maintaining high data quality is crucial for compliance and efficiency. This blog series, designed to complement the insights from The trailblazer’s guide to marketing, sales, and RevOps excellence” ebook, dives into the intricacies of RevOps data quality. By integrating the strategies and best practices from our ebook with practical advice in this series, you’ll be equipped to enhance your data management, ensure regulatory compliance, and optimize your marketing efforts. Whether you’re navigating GDPR complexities or streamlining your customer databases, our resources provide you with a comprehensive roadmap for success.

Understanding GDPR and its impact on RevOps data quality

Maybe it’s not your GDPR settings. Maybe it’s your data quality.

In the mid-2010s, as marketing teams tried to understand GDPR and its impact, there was a wide variety of responses. Some teams weren’t prepared at all, some teams were trying to make progress toward compliance so they’d be ready, and some teams were fully prepared, having switched all their processes to a double opt-in system.

A few lawsuits, such as the one against Compu-Finder in 2015, made people take note that national and state governments were becoming more serious about penalizing companies that violated laws around consumer privacy and spam email.

Increasing importance of compliance and governance

As more countries and U.S. states (looking at you, California) have created restrictions around both marketing and capturing data, more companies have looked more closely at compliance and governance for their customer and prospect databases. Unsubscribe buttons are clearer. Buying a list doesn’t constitute the right to add individuals to mass emails. Requests for personal information to be deleted must be respected and acted upon.

Challenges in maintaining RevOps data quality

This gets harder as companies merge, participate in co-marketing, and, post-pandemic, start receiving attendance lists from live events again. One of the biggest challenges with compliance is the result of duplicate data. For example, a record may appear multiple times:

Deduplication for RevOps data quality

Obviously, some clean up and deduplication is in order. Cleaned-up fields, at least for the purposes of matching and deduplicating, are bolded below:

Now, we can deduplicate based on the email address and end up with only two records, as records 2 and 3 are clearly the same person. We preserve the True value for Unsubscribe because it is always the winner if there are multiple values for unsubscribe and at least one has the value of True:

Next, we can deduplicate based on First Name, Last Name, Company, and Country. In this case, we’ve decided to use record 1 as the master that we will keep, but as that record has a free/disposable email address, we retain the corporate address instead. This record also retains the True value for unsubscribe, because one of the merged records had that value:

Achieving compliance with improved RevOps data quality

The record is now in alignment with governance and compliance rules, because we know that Mr. Bohr has opted out of emails at least at one time. There are no longer concerns that he could complain that he had opted out and still received emails, as would have been possible prior to deduplicating these records.

Opportunities for re-engagement

There’s always the opportunity for someone to reach out to Mr. Bohr individually, one-on-one, and ask if he’s interested in receiving emails or for Mr. Bohr to subscribe on his own. They could guide him to a subscription page, and Mr. Bohr would be able to resubscribe. If everything was set up correctly, this would toggle the unsubscribe field value to False, as well as date and time stamping when that happened and through what mechanism (the subscription page).

Ensuring compliance through RevOps data quality

Here we’ve ensured that the company is unsubscribe compliant with regard to duplication issues, just because of the improvement in data quality.

Interested in learning more about data quality issues? Explore our Openprise Master Class on Data Quality, or schedule a demo today!

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