Tag: data clean-up

Keeping a clean database

Bad data infiltrates every database in form of duplicate contacts, un-standardized lead data, and junk records. While you can’t always keep bad data from coming in, you can clean it up when it’s there.

In order to keep a clean database, you can sanitize your contact file before you import it, and perform a clean-up routine to the existing data.

Importing a correct data

Before you import contacts in a CSV/Excel file, check the following tips:

  • Provide correct email addresses to ensure the deliverability of your emails.
  • Provide correct phone numbers to ensure the deliverability of your texts and campaigns.
  • If possible, assign the mobile number to the primary phone number.
  • Ensure the uniformity of custom fields: don’t create multiple custom fields for identical data. This will lead to confusion over the correct custom field to keep updated, and over the Smartlists results.
    • e.g. on a first data import, custom field “Source”; on a second data import, custom field “Created through”, on a third “Origin”, on a fourth “From”. This creates 4 custom fields for one identical data.
  • Set the Global Setting rule: Do not add new Leads via API if Lead with similar email already exists (avoids duplicates)

Cleaning up the existing data

However, the bad data can still be cleaned up when it’s already there.

  • Remove duplicates
    • Go to Settings > Data Clean up
    • Choose the merging method (by email or by phone)
    • Repeat this task every now and then, depending on the volume of the incoming leads.
  • Prune inactive and junk contacts
    • Contacts with no emails and/or phone numbers are of no use in your database.
    • Leads who asked to stop receiving from you can crowd your database and preferably be deleted.

Keeping a clean database reserves more space for the correct data.

Reach us at support@aninja.com to assist you in merging duplicates.

Sanitizing or cleaning the contacts file before import

Saving the right data in aNinja allows for easy searching, powerful Smartlists, and the ability to automate your emails and texts.

Here are the essential steps to take and the common mistakes to avoid when importing your Leads into aNinja.

Sanitizing or cleaning the contacts file before import

To successfully import your contacts file, you want to remove unnecessary fields and characters.

  • Have your data saved in an Excel or Google sheet file as a dataset* and work on sanitizing it there.
    • Start your table at cell A1.
    • Always reserve the first row for the headers.
    • Make the contact name in the first column (A) of your sheet.

*dataset:

  • Remove unnecessary columns and rows. You don’t want to bloat your CRM with data that you’re not going to use.
  • Remove duplications. You don’t want to be sending the same email or text sequence to the same leads. That would be annoying for the leads and extra charges for you.
  • Trim spaces. Though we don’t save contact items with empty or just spaces values, your data would look tidier using the proper spacing.
  • Remove weird and unnecessary characters to avoid receiving errors when uploading the file.
  • Remove hyperlinks from the email or the URL addresses. Save them as text.
  • Convert the phone numbers to Numbers.
  • Delete the empty columns and rows. They might contain hidden data.
  • Rename your file headers according to aNinja fields. This helps you choose the correspondent aNinja field to map.
    • For the custom field values, simply prefix them with “Custom.” in the header.
      e.g. Custom.Location for a header of a column with the location.

Headers are in the first row (1):

Check the mapping rules to name your headers according to aNinja’s fields.

  • Lastly, save your file as CSV or Excel as aNinja supports these 2 formats.
    • A CSV file has commas in between the values of each column. If there is no comma separating the values of the columns, the CSV file is not valid. And you’ll not be able to import your file to aNinja. So, you want to check the export options that generated this file to make sure the comma is there to have a valid CSV.

Now your file is clean and ready to import to aNinja.

Have any specific questions about sanitizing or cleaning the contacts file before import? Feel free to leave us an email at support@aninja.com. We will happily assist you.

Merging leads

When you create or import new leads into your aNinja account, if they already exist in the system based on the email or phone number, they will be detected as duplicates by our duplicate search.

However, you may want to merge those duplicates into one lead file to avoid bloating your system. Merging leads could be also a good solution to avoid contacting the same lead several times.

Please note that when you merge leads, you can no longer retrieve the merged lead.

Merging Leads

You can access the merging feature from 2 different places in aNinja: From the lead view, and from Settings.

  • Lead view:
    • When on the lead view, scroll down to the end of the page and click on merge.
    • Then, choose a destination lead to merge this lead into. Immediately, this lead will be deleted after the system merged into the destination lead.
  • On the left sidebar > Settings > Data clean-up
    • Then, choose the method you want to use for your search to merge through (by email / by phone).Merging leads
    • Locate the leads you want to merge.
    • Lastly, click on the ID of the lead you want to merge. The system deletes this lead after it merged it into the lead you want to keep.

What are the fields that get merged?

What’s merged and appended into the lead file you’re keeping includes:
– Contacts
– Opportunities
– Emails
– Tasks
– Address
– Texts
– Calls
– Notes
– Triggers
– Chat conversations
– Workflows
– Custom fields

Note! All the email or text sequences of leads that are being merged are stopped. Therefore, only the sequences for the remaining lead stay active.