What best practice should a consultant recommend to maintain subscriber data quality over time?

Maintaining subscriber data quality is vital for effective marketing and communication, and regularly merging duplicate contacts is an essential practice in achieving this. Every time duplicates exist in a system, they can lead to inefficiencies, such as sending multiple emails to the same person, which can frustrate subscribers and skew engagement metrics. Regularly merging duplicate contacts helps to ensure that each individual is represented accurately in the database, thereby enhancing the integrity and reliability of the data.

Additionally, this practice simplifies segmentation and analysis, allowing for more tailored and relevant communication strategies. Consultants should prioritize this approach, as it feeds into a broader strategy of maintaining overall data hygiene, ensuring that the subscriber database remains a powerful tool for engagement and targeting.

While other practices may seem beneficial, such as using unique identifiers or validating data during imports, they don't directly address the ongoing challenge of data redundancy that arises as subscribers change their information or when user accounts are created erroneously. Regularly merging duplicates is a direct and proactive measure to sustain subscriber data quality over time.