Effective employee data management techniques

With the development of digital marketing, data management becomes the backbone of a good online marketing strategy. Clean, high-quality, reliable data that provides insight into your customer data and behavior patterns are essential to creating marketing campaigns and automation that properly engage your prospects and turn them into buying customers.

To ensure the quality of your company’s data, you should follow these data management best practices. Otherwise, you could end up with sales data that causes problems with campaign alignment and marketing automation.

1. Describe your business objectives

You don’t want to jump right into the middle of data management. Start small by describing exactly what you want to achieve with your business data. If you know what you plan to do with the data you collect, you can ensure that your data management software is not overloaded, poorly organized, and contains only the information relevant to your goal.

Too many companies still retain and store far too much data for which they have absolutely no use. By keeping only the data that your company will use, you help keep your data management software, well, for lack of a better word, manageable.

Here are a few examples of goals your company might have:

• Improve decision making
• Create/improve automatisms and processes
• Addressing target groups / creating a buyer profile
• Find the buying behavior and habits of customers
• Train sales and marketing teams in the use of data

There are so many other things you could plan with your data, but it is important to start by defining your goals. Your business data goals will guide your data management processes so you don’t end up with tons of data that doesn’t fit your business needs at all.

2. Give priority to data protection and security

First and foremost, this is an essential step to prevent your company from becoming a victim of data breaches and endangering the information of your entire customer base. If we’ve learned anything from Facebook, it’s that people really don’t like it when unknown sources have access to their personal information. Privacy and security must be a top priority when managing your company’s data.

In particular, with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that were published in the EU last year (affecting not only companies operating within the EU, but all companies that market and sell to customers residing in the EU) and other nations likely to follow in the near future, it is essential for your company to comply with all applicable regulations to ensure the privacy of your prospects and customers.

The use of appropriate data management software can help ensure the security of your data, and compliance with GDPR and other data collection regulations can also enhance your privacy. Put the right people in charge of your data and make sure your team members know how to properly handle the data they work with.

Finally, develop a plan or procedure to follow in the event of a suspected data breach in your organization. Ideally, this will never happen, but it’s always good to have a strategy for dealing with a potential breach.

3. Focus on data quality

While, as explained in the first section, limiting your data to the information your organization needs to meet its objectives is a good way to improve data quality, there are so many other steps you can take to ensure that the data your organization collects remains clean and reliable.

First of all, you need to regularly check the accuracy of the data, as old data may become obsolete and no longer relevant to your sales and marketing teams. Obsolete or outdated data often needs to be removed from your data management software to prevent it from having a negative impact on your sales and marketing automation, analysis and other processes.

Another step you can take to help your team focus on data quality as part of your data management is to train all team members who have access to the data on proper data collection and data entry methods. Most methods are likely to be automated, but if your team members implement these automation or in cases where data can be manually entered into your CRM or data management software, training is required. This prevents data from being entered incorrectly, which avoids problems later on.

Ensure that data is reviewed and cleaned before being used in analyses or reports to improve the accuracy of any measurements derived from the data. Making data quality a top priority (by closely monitoring data security) will help keep all aspects of data use in your organization clean and reliable.

4. Reduce duplicate data

There are many ways your company can receive duplicate data from a prospect or customer, and you should have processes in place to manage potential redundancies. If a prospect chooses multiple magnets or offers, or if a customer returns to make another purchase, make sure your company has processes in place to prevent duplicate data from being added to your data management system.

Although many companies do not think about this when setting up their data management system, it is essential to create systems that allow data to be updated or changed if a customer chooses more than once or makes a repurchase. Data duplication and redundancy arrangements are just another way to ensure that your data stays clean.

5. Make sure that your data is easily accessible to your team

There is a fine line between security and convenience when accessing your data. You want to make it absolutely impossible for unauthorized people to access your company’s customer data, but you don’t want the authorized members of your sales and marketing teams to have to access the information they need for their daily work.

It is a good idea to define special connections and access rights for individuals based on their specific role/data requirements. Executives or team leaders who may need to access more customer data than analysts or salespeople should have more permissions than those who only need certain types of data. This also ensures that your customer data is protected within your own company. By defining different authorization levels, your team members can access the necessary data more easily, instead of trying to define general rules and authorizations that can be problematic, too restrictive, or too open in some cases.

6. Create a data recovery strategy

Because accidents happen, it’s important for your business to have some sort of data recovery strategy. The loss of access to all your customer data could have an extremely negative impact on your marketing campaigns, marketing automation and sales strategies. If someone makes a mistake and deletes some or all of your data, if your accounts are somehow closed, or if your CRM or data management software goes down, you need to have a backup or recovery plan.

Find a solution that makes sense for your business. Try exporting your data regularly so you have a file containing all the information stored on a hard drive, or upload it to a cloud computing service such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Make sure your account has security clearances in case you get blocked. Make backups of all your data so that you can quickly and easily restore it if something happens.

7. Use high-quality data management software

Finding good software is an essential step in creating a quality data management process for your business. Investing in the wrong data management software can cause problems over problems. Whether it’s too complex for your team to understand, whether a system is too big for your business needs (some data management companies focus only on businesses, not all types, and sizes), or not secure enough for your business to rely on, there are many things involved in finding the perfect data management software for your needs.

You want to find a customer data platform that gives you a clear and accurate view of your prospects and customer data and helps you connect with your audience in an accurate and timely manner. Your customer data platform should facilitate the work of your sales and marketing teams by automatically enriching and cleansing data to give you the most accurate and complete view of your data.

If you invest in the wrong customer data platform in the first place, it will cost your business to relearn a new system, train your staff in correct data entry, and review your data entry processes.

If you’re looking for an automated Human Resource Management system, we suggest you IceHrm which is one of the best HRIS systems which has so many HR functions automated into one system.

IceHrm is a Human resource management system for small and medium-sized organizations. This HRM software centralizes employee data and allows only one authorized person to access it, providing a high level of security. The presence module monitors employee time based on information about insertion and perforation. It covers all the basic HRM needs of a company such as Time Management, Training, and Development, Attendance Management, Expense management, leave management, Recruitment management and handling employee information.