Outbase report reveals scale and impact of poor quality data

Successful prospecting involves many ingredients, like great email templates, clever personalisation, and automated follow up sequences.

But if you don’t have accurate data then your results will still suffer no matter how good you are at writing outreach emails.

With this in mind, the new report from Outbase makes for some concerning reading.

A survey of 500 marketers and business professionals revealed the scale of poor data currently polluting the marketing world.

More than four in five marketers report that at least 20% of their marketing database is out of date.

That’s one in five emails that are as much use as a message written in Excel on an old Nokia phone.

Shockingly, a quarter of the marketers say that more than 40% of their database is out of date.

One major contributor to the widespread increase in bounce rate is the “Great Resignation.” 

Over the last two years, a wave of redundancies and resignations have seen people move jobs more frequently. As a consequence, email marketing lists become out of date more quickly.

Despite all this, email marketing has continued to be one of the most successful channels. Since the pandemic started, email engagement has increased for 70% of email marketers.

Crazy eh? The vast majority of marketing teams are sending 20% of their emails to defunct email addresses, and yet email responses and leads are still going up

Imagine how good engagement rates would be if they weren’t wasting every fifth email!

Rob Harlow, Co-founder of Outbase, says: “It’s the youngest marketers – those in the 16-24 age bracket – that are working the hardest to keep databases up to date, and they’re seeing the best engagement, albeit at a significant time cost. The good news is that there’s a better solution: modern prospecting platforms eliminate the out-of-date data problem and make it simple to contact the right people and businesses every time.”

 More information on Outbase’s research is available in the report: How has the great resignation impacted sales and prospecting data?