Episode 67 - How to Avoid BIG Mistakes with Email Data and Bank or Credit Union Marketing

In this episode, Meredith Olmstead, CEO of FI GROW Solutions, and Kristin Mock, an inbound marketing strategist at the company, explore real-world challenges and solutions in data management for digital marketing. They discuss a specific incident involving data upload errors at a financial institution and provide practical advice for avoiding similar issues.


Key Takeaways:

1. Importance of Automation in Data Management: The conversation highlights the critical role of automation in preventing errors in data handling. Manually updating and uploading data, as was the case with the discussed client who uploaded incorrect email addresses for 10,000 contacts, can lead to significant issues such as increased costs and email delivery problems. Automating data uploads and integration can drastically reduce the likelihood of such errors and improve overall data cleanliness.

2. Impact of Data Errors on Email Marketing: Learn how simple mistakes in data management could have broader implications for email marketing strategies. For instance, the erroneous upload led to a high volume of hard bounces, which not only affected the financial institution’s email sender reputation but also triggered a response from their email service provider (HubSpot) due to the unusual spike in bounce rates. This example serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of maintaining a low bounce rate (under 1%) to prevent potential disruptions in email communications.

3. Proactive Data Quality Checks: Regular monitoring and cleaning of email lists were emphasized as essential practices to avoid damaging bounce rates and to uphold email deliverability standards. The podcast advocates for a proactive approach to data management, such as quarterly reviews of unsubscribes and bounces and ensuring data accuracy before uploads. This includes double-checking data entries ("measure twice, cut once" philosophy) to mitigate risks associated with manual data handling and to maintain healthy communication channels with customers.

Transcription:

Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions and I'm here with Kristin Mock. Kristin is one of our inbound marketing strategists. Say hi, Kristin.

Kristin Mock:
Hi.

Meredith Olmstead:
And we do digital marketing and sales consulting for banks and credit unions, and we were just having a really funny but not funny conversation about data cleanliness and really how to avoid big problems with data uploads and mistakes that we sometimes see. Recently, Kristin had a client that had a potentially disastrous data situation and she was able to save them from themselves, but we thought it might be a really solid conversation to have. So wanted to talk about how to avoid some big mistakes with data when it comes to your bank or credit union marketing efforts. So tell us what happened. Obviously you're not going to tell us the actual client, but they've told you that we could talk about it as long as we don't out them. So what happened, Kristin?

Kristin Mock:
Essentially they were manually uploading a list of all of their email contacts, account-level data, and about 10,000 of their contacts were uploaded incorrectly with wrong email addresses.

Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. So they had a typo. Basically, they had gone in to manually update one of the lines or one of the columns in their data before they uploaded it. They replaced a number with a letter Y or something, and instead it updated the email list with a new letter in place of a number, and it basically impacted how many of the contacts that were uploaded?

Kristin Mock:
Just over 10,000.

Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. So what happened?

Kristin Mock:
Automated emails started going out to these people and regularly scheduled emails started going out to these people. And with that many incorrect email addresses, there were a lot of hard bounces. And so the issue was noticed when we were getting errors for how many emails were hard bouncing to incorrect contacts.

Meredith Olmstead:
So they didn't realize they made the mistake when they did the upload. So a couple of things that could happen then. Obviously if you've got 10,000 "new" people that you upload into your email system, you're going to have a lot more people, a lot of email programs. Like we are a HubSpot partner, but a lot of people's email programs will charge you based on the number of contacts or emails for people that you have in their system. So if you all of a sudden go from 50,000 to 60,000, you may end up having to spend more money almost immediately. So that's an issue. It can push you up in terms of price. And then, like you said, so a lot of emails are going to bounce. Now you might think on surface, well, that's good because then at least the wrong people didn't get the wrong email. But why is a lot of emails starting to bounce all at once a problem?

Kristin Mock:
For email sending scores, you really need to monitor that health and if you're getting a lot of hard bounces, your account can be impacted and especially Google and Yahoo Mail are both making a lot of efforts even recently to make sure that they're not giving people spam emails and things that they don't want in their inboxes. So those scores are very important. And so having anything over 5% of your emails hard bouncing, most systems are going to just stop because it's terribly damaging your health score. Under 1% is really where you want to be, but 5% is really where a lot of those platforms are going to start kind of dinging you on that.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, so I think we got an actual email from one of our reps for this client at the email program at HubSpot saying, "Hey, what's going on? All of a sudden we're getting this massive spike in hard bounces, thousands of emails bouncing when usually there's five emails that bounce kind of thing." And so it caused a problem, flagged their account, shut their account email sends down and all of that. So it was kind of a big deal because if you need to email people and you can't send email because your email program has said, hey, what are you guys doing? We're going to stop your sending because it'll mess up everybody on that program. So it's an issue. So what did you do to fix it? How did they get through this email crisis basically?

Kristin Mock:
Well, first we had to stop all the emails from going out. So anything that hadn't been stopped from hard bounces, we went ahead and put a stop to that and we needed to upload the list of all the correct data. We needed to get all the contacts that were supposed to be updated that day with the correct information in there. And then after that we could take the two different uploads, the one that had the bad emails and compare it to the one that had the good emails and identify, that's how we found that it was 10,000, identify exactly which ones had the wrong email addresses and needed to be removed from the account.

Meredith Olmstead:
Gotcha. Okay. Let's talk moral of the story here. Basically, we have clients that don't have an automated way of driving their new customers', their new members', if they're a credit union, details into their email sending program or their customer relationship management tool, which for us is HubSpot, but could be any email program. This is not that uncommon for mid-sized institutions to not have this automated. But in general, the moral of the story here would be, what would you say?

Kristin Mock:
Automate everything you can. Get it set up the first time and then kind of eliminate that human error anywhere you can.

Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. So basically, manually, you're going to rely on a marketing associate or a manager or somebody to be scrubbing lists on a daily basis and manually uploading them. At some point there's going to be a mistake of some kind. And so if you can, it may be worth it to go through the process of doing an integration or setting up some automated processes for cleaning data and uploading it. In terms of other kind of data cleanliness, especially when it comes to marketing data and communicating with people and their contact details, what are some other things that we tend to do for our clients regularly just to make sure their data stays clean and put together?

Kristin Mock:
Sure. So a huge thing is monitoring those email addresses for accuracy so that those bounces are not getting over 1%. Scrubbing your list, regularly for anyone who's unsubscribed from emails, marked you as spam or any email addresses that just aren't right. People either type them wrong or give you a wrong email address and that's going to cause you to have hard bounces. So just regularly making sure that the people who you're sending emails to and who you're keeping on your contact lists are who you want.

Meredith Olmstead:
Gotcha. And for HubSpot, they do this with a lot of HubSpot clients, you can designate them for marketing or for non-marketing. So you don't actually have to delete them completely from your system, but you can designate them as a contact that you don't want to contact again. If they've unsubscribed, they kind of become that. They won't be emailed again, but you still have to make that designation. Okay, so that makes sense. So trying to really pay attention on a quarterly basis to unsubscribes and bounces.

The other thing that a lot of times I've seen that can be frustrating is sometimes data will come out of a core system and it's not pretty. It'll have weird codes that designate certain products or services or it will have first names or last names in all caps or something like that. So we definitely try to push people to say, don't just accept the data the way that it comes because that is. You can definitely usually find ways or automate ways to clean it up so that when it goes into your programs, it's more user-friendly in that way. So that's another one. But if you have to manually upload or if something happens and you have to manually upload, what would be the rule of thumb?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah, I mean measure twice, cut once. Just make sure that you're really reviewing every change that you're making. If you're the one cleaning up that data manually, if you're the one uploading that data, you really just need to check yourself once, twice, thrice. Make sure that you're not uploading anything wrong because I mean, in this example, we saw one incorrect upload affect multiple emails, affect an entire account and it took hours of cleanup to find what happened and get to the bottom of it and clean everything up and get everything working appropriately. And then we had to assess the damage to the email health score. In this case, because we caught it quickly, it was fine, but just being aware that one little mess up can really affect a lot of different things. So just be very, very cautious when you're uploading anything that you're doing manually.

Meredith Olmstead:
Awesome. All right, well, it's a small little thing, but it can have a big impact and really hurt your marketing efforts over the long-term if you don't pay attention even to these little details. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. Appreciate the know-how. And if you all want to learn more about marketing and sales for banks and credit unions, visit us at figrow.com. We have a lot of other podcasts and blogs and ebooks and case studies there, and otherwise let's just all get out there and make it happen.