When and Where to Deduplicate Your CRM: Purchased Data

WHEN AND WHERE TO DEDUPLICATE YOUR CRM PART 2 - IMPORTED DATA

Following When and Where to Deduplicate your CRM – Part 1, where the scenario discussed was a brand new CRM system, we now look at how to manage duplicate data when importing it, commonly when buying data for marketing purposes.

When and Where to Deduplicate Your CRM with Imported Purchased Data

When and Where to Deduplicate Your New CRM

Deduplicate your Updated CRM

You have purchased data, and now you want to run some marketing activity against it. However, it would be sensible to ensure that when you use the data, you are not trying to sell to existing customers. Or at least, know that they don’t already have what you are trying to sell to them.

Scenario 2 – Imported Purchased Data

I am trying to avoid the situation where one of your best customers gets a marketing communication that shows no knowledge that they are an existing customer, and potentially already have the product! It doesn’t matter if this is via email, a letter, or telemarketing. We have all probably had these types of communications and know how it feels.

So, how to avoid this happening? Deduplicate the list before bringing it into CRM. Yes, but isn’t that a complex routine to match across two data sources in separate databases or formats? Paribus 365™ can do this, but it would not be our preferred approach.

There does need to be consideration of how you generally manage “Leads”. Are you using the Lead entity in your CRM, or do you enter a new enquiry (Lead?) as a new Account and Contact. There are various schools of thought around this, and I am not going into detail on those, so please review the following with how you manage this area in mind.

Removing the duplicates before importing does have some advantages:

It reduces the time taken to import the data
It may help you claim back some costs from your data supplier because you can easily identify the amount of data you already have. For example, if I am provided with a list of 1,000, I remove 200 duplicate records, so I should only pay for 800 records.

But, that's about it.

Our Recommendations

Import the data with a Tagged identifier into an area of the system that is not visible to the general users. In Infor CRM this might be into a specific Ownership, in Dynamics 365 this could be a Business Unit that is only visible to the Marketing Users. The point of “hiding” this imported data, at this time, is that the general users are not confused by it.
Using the Filter functionality in Paribus 365™ run the identification step with one side of the match session being the existing data, and the other being the imported Tagged data in the “hidden” area. This is most effective if you are not using the Lead area.
Complete the merge process. There may be a few iterations of the identify/merge steps, adjusting the matching criteria through the process.

The key advantages of doing this within the CRM are similar to the previous scenario - A New CRM to deduplicate.

You are in control
You know your data and when it comes to confirming what is or isn’t a duplicate, and which should be the Preferred Master, you decide.
You retain more valuable data
The merging of records within CRM, as managed by Paribus 365™, means that the Master record is enriched with data from the duplicate(s). For example, when the Master record does not have a phone number but the duplicate does, the phone number is moved also.

You will find more duplicates!
The key strength of the Paribus 365™ tools is identifying duplicates not likely to be found by other means. Read our data diary on What is Fuzzy Matching? for more information.

If you are using Leads in Dynamics 365, then Paribus 365™ makes the qualification process a lot easier. It helps users avoid creating duplicates by immediately identifying possible existing matches (duplicate records). The user can then take the appropriate action with the Lead and associate it with the existing Account, Contact, as well as seeing that this person has entered via your website several times – invaluable information when managing the Lead qualification process.

If you have missed the first article in this series - When and Where to Deduplicate Your New CRM, you can read it here.

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