{"id":50357,"date":"2022-07-07T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/?p=50357"},"modified":"2022-07-12T11:13:15","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T15:13:15","slug":"data-hygiene-your-email-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/blog\/data-hygiene-your-email-marketing","title":{"rendered":"How to Make Data Hygiene Your Email Marketing Superpower"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\t
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Data hygiene may not sound like the most exciting part of email marketing\u2014but it\u2019s one of the most important steps to designing campaigns that perform. The fact is, your data<\/a> impacts whether (and how well) you can personalize emails, the extent to which your subscribers engage with your messages, and whether they receive them in their inbox at all.<\/p>\n

But just as your subscriber data is always in a state of change\u2014data hygiene is not a one and done proposition. It requires discipline, governance, and proactivity with teams (and vendors) across your organization.<\/p>\n

We recently picked the brains of experts from Klaviyo<\/a>, Simon Data<\/a>, and Litmus Personalize powered by Kickdynamic<\/a> for their best practices, tips and insights on all things data hygiene, and how to apply it for impactful email personalization<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read on for some of their top tips\u2014or watch the full webinar on-demand here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

What is data hygiene?<\/h2>\n

In its broadest form, data hygiene is the act of regularly and consistently ensuring that the data you have about your customers and prospects is accurate, current, trustworthy, and useful.<\/p>\n

Why good data hygiene is important<\/h2>\n

More than 60% of customers<\/a> expect that the data they trust marketers to handle will be used to improve their customer experience with personalized marketing<\/a> experiences. But that demands marketers have proactive and ongoing data hygiene strategies in place, to ensure that the information they do have is actionable and correct.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe raw material that you have in good clean data can really help maximize the effectiveness downstream of all of your marketing efforts.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carlos Barrero, Strategic Tech Partner Manager at Klaviyo<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

And because personalized communication in any form\u2014including email personalization<\/a>\u2014is all about delivering the exact right message to the exact right customer at the exact right time, Matt Williams,<\/b> Senior Solutions Architect at Simon Data, says timeliness of the data used to power that experience is critically important, too. Without a solid and consistent data hygiene process, any data could become outdated by the time it\u2019s actually cleaned, pulled and put to use.<\/p>\n

How poor data hygiene can impact email marketing<\/h2>\n

\u201cPoor data hygiene leads to poor engagement<\/a>, deliverability<\/a> and return on investment (ROI)<\/a>\u2014in that order,\u201d says Barrero. Consider how inaccurate data could cause an avalanche of issues, even when applied to the most basic form of personalization in email marketing<\/a>: the first name in a subject line.<\/p>\n