Hey, hey Reader,

I’ve been helping a client move from what I generously call an ESP to a real-deal platform.

As exciting as it sounds, most of our time hasn’t been spent designing email flows or writing copy.

It’s been meetings.

About forms...and fields...and data.

Specifically:

• Where the current data lives
• What’s actually usable
• How to prevent garbage data from creeping back in

Funny enough, this week, I stumbled on a Slack thread that felt eerily familiar. Marketers and ops folks were talking about placeholder values like “X” and “NA” in fields, phone numbers entered where emails should be (and vice versa), and trying to clean it all up after the fact using tools like ZoomInfo or LeanData.

(Their bubble bursted...even those can’t help if the data going in is total chaos.)

Side note: I always assumed phone numbers were collected for SMS marketing. But, in actuality, they’re used to validate and deduplicate contacts, which only works if they’re legit. Thought that was very interesante.

But back to my point. Clean data isn’t glamorous. But if your email metrics feel off, if your segmentation’s glitchy, or if you’ve been burned by a migration before… it might not be your ESP.

It might be the stuff hiding behind the scenes, in your forms, your fields, and your rules.

Here are 3 data hygiene quick wins you can do today:

Audit your forms

What fields are you collecting? Are they required? Are you unintentionally letting people enter “asdf” in your phone number field?

Don’t even get me started on job titles: Dean, Principal, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction... it’s chaos. Same goes for NJ vs New Jersey. Your ESP doesn't know they're the same.

Use hidden fields for attribution

Great for tracking where leads come from (webinar, LinkedIn, conference booth) without making your forms longer.

Set basic validation rules

Block junk values so “other” doesn’t become your most popular data point. Even simple checks like making sure emails include “@” or rejecting placeholder text can help stop the garbage-in-garbage-out spiral.

That's it for me; let me know if this helps you or if you have any questions. See you next Wednesday.

And as always , I'm rooting for you 👏. Kelly