There are no second thoughts to the fact that almost every organization in this digital era is dealing with data on a daily basis. They need data to improve business processes. However, the quality of data matters a lot for seamless business operations. One cannot blindly rely on raw data for strategic decisions.

Raw data is considered as poor due to the inaccuracies and invalid entries that it often carries. Using bad data for business can negatively impact its growth. Thus, the need for data standardization. For instance, if your customer data lacks address standardization, there are fair chances that you will be sending emails to invalid addresses or to people who are not interested in your business. Hence, wastage of marketing efforts, money and time.

Now, let us delve a little deeper to understand what data standardization is, how it is implemented and benefits businesses.

Data Standardization: A Brief

Data standardization is the process of systematically categorizing scattered data gathered from different sources and multiple formats in a standard format. Using raw data extracted from diverse formats and ways may cause misrepresentations and analytics blunders.

Standardizing data brings everything in a single format which further simplifies the process. You get clear and consistent that can be easily shared, accessed and analyzed by anyone in the organization.

Having everything in a single format makes it easier to identify irrelevant and inaccurate entries. It also boosts up the time of accessing and analyzing data for actionable insights. A seamless and consistent data collection process leads to well-informed decisions and provides clear forecasts. Besides, it rectifies errors and irrelevancies like inconsistent capitalization, punctuation, acronyms, alphanumeric values, and other characters.

Why Data Standardization Is Imperative For Organizations?

Data standardization is imperative for organizations because data sources in marketing are extensively diverse.

Let’s take the marketing data, for example, it is extracted from different channels like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. Data from such sources are compiled in the respective format that the channel follows.

While Facebook gives data through likes, shares, and comments, Twitter shows you retweets. Though it seems on the surface that they are just giving user engagement, for marketers, the analysis goes deeper than that. Thus, it gets necessary to identify the type of data to be collected and how it will be collected for any marketing operation.

Standardization simplifies this complexity and manual efforts of managing and extracting data from multiple channels. It further outlines the prospects of data, the process of data extraction, data validation and compilation.

How To Implement Data Standardization?

• Process Your Raw Data

The first step towards data standardization is to make your data error-free. Prior to making any data entry to your CRM database, make your data undergo data processing. It involves data cleaning, data verification, data validation and more. Processing your data ensures that the data is free from inaccuracies and errors. It further provides proper formatting for operational efficiency.

For instance, you have unprocessed customer data to run a marketing campaign. Most probably the customer list will have addresses entered in a variety of formats or some duplicate/invalid entries. Deriving the right information from a variety of formats gets difficult and complicated. The same is the case with duplicate and invalid entries.

Without address validation and verification, the deliverability and success rate of your campaign will be impacted. Thus, to authenticate your customer data, you need the address verification. However, verifying data sources and eliminating data inaccuracies is time-consuming and tedious. As an effective alternative, organizations nowadays switching to address validation and verification services to transform their database and make it more precise, functional and valuable.

• Define The Data Quality

Organizations have diverse needs when it comes to data. Understand your organizational requirements and the type of data that needs to be normalized. This will help you to determine the relationship between the data and the standards that must be implied to control it.

When you are setting your data standards, it must be specific yet comprehensive and progressive. It should not leave any room for major modifications. You must cover every category in your business system so that you do not have to reinvent the data as well as the data standards. The policies and rules for organizing data must be such that it can be applicable to both the current database and future databases.

• Start Standardizing Data For Your Organization

Once you understand the categories of data you need and define the rules for normalizing data, you are ready to standardize it. Start with the external data sources. When you keep a standard format for the sources, you are modifying the sources as per your requirements.

Doing this will automatically feed your database in the format that you and your stakeholders have mutually decided in the form of standardization. This is external data standardization where you are working with stakeholders to standardize external data sources and eventually your data.

Now, comes the time to standardize internal data. Internal data is what is currently available with your organization. Such data sources are generally related to customer online behavior and often comes in the types of ad clicks, form submission, conversions, lead details, email open rate, etc. Apply the set standards and you are sorted.

Final Words

Once you’ve got the standardization done, it is up to you to analyze the standardized database for the final result. We understand that doing everything manually is too tedious and exhausting. There are various data management platforms that can normalize all of your data effortlessly in no time. Besides, you can always have experts at your assistance through outsourcing data standardization services. You can choose the type of data you require and the services accordingly. For example, organizations that deal with customer data for digital marketing often go for address standardization services. It gives them a standard, well-formatted, verified and validated data to reach out to their target audience.

Partner With SunTec Data for Standardizing Your Data

We know that when it comes to business operations and marketing, data is the key to success. But, the challenge lies in effectively using it for the best results. You can go for online standardization tools, but outsourcing the process to qualified professionals is your best bet to get customized results.

Need more information on data standardization? Drop a mail to info@suntecdata.com and have a free consultation from data management experts.