| Summary: | This article provides guidance on when and where to deduplicate your CRM system, and the processes required to manage those duplicates. This is the second in this series – imported purchased data. |
| Article Type: | Information/Guidance |
| Related Product(s): | This article relates to the following products:
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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.
Scenario 2 – Imported Purchased Data
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.
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 data bases or formats? Actually Paribus Discovery 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 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, I am provided with a list of 1,000, I remove 200 duplicates records, so I should only pay for 800 records.
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 Discovery run the identification step with one side of the match session being the existing data, 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.
- Move the remaining data in the “hidden” area into the general user area so it can be used as required.
The key advantages of doing this within the CRM are similar to the previous scenario:
- You are in control
You know your data so when it comes to confirming what is or isn’t a duplicate, which should be the Preferred Master, you decide.
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- You retain more valuable data
The merging of records within CRM, as managed by Paribus Discovery, means that the Master record is enriched with data from the duplicate. For example, when the Master record does not have a phone number but the duplicate does, the phone number is moved also.
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- You will find more duplicates!
The key strength of Paribus Discovery is identifying duplicates not likely to be found by other means.
If you are using Leads in Dynamics 365, then Paribus Interactive 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 web site several times – invaluable information when managing the Lead qualification process.
You can take a free trial of Paribus 365 to find out how many duplicates you actually have, or contact us for more information.
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