Data hygiene: what it is, best practices & how to improve it

Data hygiene: what it is, best practices & how to improve it

Data doesn't stay clean on its own.

The moment you start collecting customer information (email addresses, phone numbers, purchase histories, behavioral data), the clock starts ticking.

People move. They change jobs. They abandon email accounts and get new phone numbers. Duplicate records creep in. Typos happen. Naming conventions drift.

This is data decay, and it happens faster than most businesses realize.

The average organization sees about 30% of its data become outdated or inaccurate every year. That's a direct hit to your ability to personalize customer experiences, run effective campaigns, and make decisions you can trust.

Data hygiene is how you fight back. It's the ongoing process of cleaning, validating, and maintaining your data so it stays accurate, complete, and usable over time.

Not a one-time cleanup project, but a continuous discipline built into how you collect, store, and manage information.

This guide covers what data hygiene means, why it matters for your business, and the best practices for keeping your database clean at scale.

What is data hygiene?

Data hygiene is the ongoing process of maintaining the accuracy, consistency, and integrity of your data. It includes everything from removing duplicate records and fixing formatting errors to standardizing naming conventions and purging outdated information.

Think of it like maintaining a house. You don't clean once and call it done—you have ongoing routines to keep things from falling into disrepair.

Data works the same way.

Without regular hygiene practices, your database accumulates clutter: duplicate contacts, invalid email addresses, inconsistent formatting, outdated records that no longer reflect reality.

The goal of data hygiene isn't just clean data for its own sake. It's ensuring the data you rely on for marketing campaigns, customer personalization, analytics, and business decisions is trustworthy. Bad data leads to bad outcomes—wasted ad spend on invalid emails, personalization that misses the mark, reports that don't reflect what's really happening.

Data hygiene also intersects with security and compliance. Knowing what data you have, where it lives, and who can access it is foundational to protecting customer information and meeting regulatory requirements like GDPR and CCPA.

You can't secure data you don't know exists, and you can't comply with deletion requests if your records are scattered and inconsistent.

Why is data hygiene important?

Dirty data doesn't just sit there—it actively undermines your business. Here's what's at stake when data hygiene falls by the wayside.

Bad data is expensive

Poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million per year. That's real money lost to misguided campaigns, flawed analytics, operational inefficiencies, and decisions made on inaccurate information.

Think about a marketing team running a win-back campaign to re-engage lapsed customers. If their list includes people who already made a purchase last week, customers who've unsubscribed, and email addresses that bounce, they're burning budget (and damaging their sender reputation at the same time).

Personalization depends on accuracy

Personalization only works if the data behind it is accurate. Recommend a product someone just returned? Send a birthday discount to someone whose birthday was three months ago?

And those personalized touches become reminders that you don't actually know your customers.

Real-time, accurate data lets you personalize based on what customers are doing now—not what your database thinks they did six months ago.

Dirty data compounds over time

Data decay is the gradual process of data losing its value, either by being lost entirely (e.g., accidentally deleted) or as a result of the data entry becoming outdated and irrelevant. And data decays at a rate of about 30% each year for the average business.

Eventually, you reach a point where nobody trusts the data at all, and that's when you see analysts spending more time cleaning spreadsheets than generating insights, and marketing teams second-guessing every audience list.

We know that data is what fuels top-tier customer experiences, product development, strategizing, machine learning—you name it. So, it makes sense that businesses should be placing a huge priority on protecting the integrity of their data, rather than allowing one-third of it to become essentially useless every year. 

5 benefits of proper data hygiene

Data hygiene helps you make accurate, data-driven decisions that promote everything from increased revenue to stronger customer satisfaction rates. We’ve listed a few benefits below.

1. Greater success with lead generation

Leveraging accurate data is the key to creating better customer experiences that convert. It’s also essential for boosting your ROI. For example, say a marketing team wants to run an email campaign for recent cart abandoners, but their audience list includes email addresses that have been deactivated or misspelled. The likelihood of making a sale in those instances drops to zero.

Or, on the flip side, say the marketing team reaches a customer who recently bought the product they were trying to promote. That’s also money down the drain, in trying to convert a customer they’ve already won.

2. Faster lead tracking

Personalizing interactions with prospective customers based on their funnel stage is a tried and true way of ushering users through the funnel (and closing a deal). But if you’re working with outdated data, it can be impossible to precisely target these communications. Data hygiene ensures that you understand where a person currently is in the funnel, what information they need to move forward, their preferred channel of communicating, and more. 

Not to mention, with accurate, up-to-date data, you could even automate some of these interactions to nurture leads at scale.

3. Secure data

Another aspect of data hygiene is security. That is, how are you protecting customer data both internally (e.g., blocking widespread access to personally identifiable information) and externally (e.g., avoiding a data breach).  

Some security measures that we take at Twilio Segment include:

4. Accurate personalization

Personalization and ROI go hand-in-hand – nearly half of customers said they’d make a repeat purchase after experiencing a personalized shopping experience with a retailer.

But when data is inaccurate, personalizing the customer experience devolves into a game of chance. With access to real-time data, businesses can track customer journeys as they unfold and initiate highly tailored interactions (and even do this at scale with the help of automation).

5. Revenue protection

Data hygiene helps prevent revenue losses from misguided decisions as a result of skewed and inaccurate data reporting. 

It also helps teams become more precise in their campaign planning and audience lists, meaning money isn’t thrown down the drain by trying to convert customers who aren’t interested.

Best practices for data hygiene 

Want to get it right when it comes to data hygiene? We’ve listed some best practices below.

1. Audit your existing data

A data audit involves evaluating your organization’s data assets, systems, and sources to learn whether the data is complete, accurate, and secure. 

Check for duplicate records, spelling mistakes, multiple naming conventions, and other errors that could disrupt your operations, analyses, or campaign performance.

2. Standardize naming conventions

Standardizing naming conventions helps ensure that data entries are uniform, and that the same event isn’t being counted twice (or multiple times). Having these uniform naming conventions in place can also help businesses automatically block events that don’t adhere to their tracking plan, which helps protect data quality at scale.

3. Understand data lifecycles

The data lifecycle refers to the journey a unit of data undergoes from its initial collection to its eventual storage or deletion. Understanding how data is collected, processed, and stored at your company is essential for maintaining data hygiene. For one, it prevents silos from cropping up and causing fragmentation across your data sets. Second, it helps ensure data security by understanding who is able to access what data (e.g., preventing a leak in personally identifiable information), and how that data is protected at rest. 

Data mapping can be helpful for understanding the data lifecycle. Here's a guide on how to do it.

4. Choose the right analytics database

An analytics database is a data management platform that stores and organizes data. It specializes in scalability and quickly returning queries, and is usually part of a broader data warehouse or data lake. An analytics database gives you the ability to quickly analyze large volumes of data and easily spot issues or trends at a faster rate than combing through manually.

Clean and create a shared data dictionary with Twilio Segment

A customer data platform (CDP) like Twilio Segment helps you collect, clean, consolidate and protect your data at scale.

Using Protocols, businesses can create a shared data dictionary that’s automatically enforced to protect data integrity. It helps establish a universal tracking plan, standard naming conventions, automated QA checks, and more.

Replace spreadsheets with tracking plans

A tracking plan in Protocols outlines the events and properties you want to collect. This helps establish a single source of truth within the organization, and create internal alignment.

This tracking plan template is useful if you don’t want to create your own from scratch or just need some ideas on where to start.

Integrate with APIs & Typewriter

These tools reduce implementation errors by generating Twilio Segment analytics libraries based on your tracking plan.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) help you manage your Twilio Segment workspaces and the resources that come with them. Typewriter takes an event from your tracking plan and uses it to generate a typed analytics call in different languages. This reduces or entirely eliminates incorrect instrumentations in your production environments. 

The more extensible documentation you have, the more it can be used to improve business strategies.

Automate data validation

With Protocols’ automatic data validation, you can quickly audit your implementation and cut down on missed inaccuracies. Automated alerts and reports help you diagnose data quality issues.

Human error is inevitable when manually validating information, but it’s often too late when the mistake is realized. Protocols detects mistakes before they impact production or other strategies.