by Mohd Sohel, Negosentro.com |
For marketers, maximizing their ROI is critical to the success of their marketing campaigns. In today’s digital world, the use of data quality tools for marketing has changed the game of the industry. Fine tuning and maximizing campaigns creates more opportunity for the industry than ever before. Marketers can now analyze thousands of points of information about the digital customer and combine it with their knowledge of traditional campaign methods, allowing them to make smarter decisions on how to allocate budget money to maximize their efforts.
For the industry, this is not only energizing, but is a grounding-breaking approach that requires rethinking of their overall strategy. However, many marketers realize that data quality is a major issue within their organization, and would like to address it somehow. However, many organizations struggle with the same issue: the need for a simple plan.
Data quality initiatives can be complex and intimidating. Most vendors offer only large scale, expensive, and time consuming solutions that are not guaranteed successes based on previous engagements. Some organizations develop initiative fatigue after a few months of creating large elaborate plans and structures with an outside vendor. Even the vendor screening process can be a barrier to starting data quality initiatives.
Even understanding the most basic concepts of data quality software, to include the techniques of merge and purge, has presented a learning curve for marketing professionals. It is extremely important for CMOs and marketing professionals to focus their efforts on perfecting the highest possible quality of their data. Through these efforts, the industry is beginning to change their processes from top down marketing, where budget moneyis allocated to specific campaigns based on data, to a bottom-up method. This model allows markets the ability to analyze and understand customer behaviors and preferences, starting from the point of purchase, and tracking back through their digital footprint, to better understand their behaviors and motivations.
Marketers are becoming more effective at implementing precisely targeted campaigns that are immediately responsive, thus maximizing their ROI. These successes can only be realized through proper and effective use of data quality tools.
If you run an email marketing campaign, you know the value of clean, accurate data. So how effective can your email marketing campaign truly be if it isn’t delivering what you want – to who you want? Paying attention to email deliverability is one of the most important things a marketer can do to maintain high standards of data quality.
The negative impact of poor data quality has been well documented. It is clear that poor data quality can result in a significant drop in competitiveness, lower customer satisfaction and increased costs. Some tend to play down the issue as part of doing business in the digital age, while others find themselves intimidated by the scope of a project that initially feels too daunting to launch.
Whatever the situation may be, ignoring the poor data quality issues in an organization will continue to compound the problems. This can result in significantly lower productivity and higher operating costs. At the end of the day, a thorough and methodical approach to resolving poor data quality in an organization will be worth the time and money spent.
While each plan may differ, a quick start plan can get things moving immediately, maintaining the morale of the team with fast successes and a strong ROI.
6 Steps to Improved Data Quality
Here are some steps you can start taking to improve your data quality, and drive your marketing efforts in a positive direction:
- Assess what your multiple data sources are, and identify where steps can be taken to optimize how data is gathered.
- Be sure to enter all data (addresses, phone numbers, email addresses) accurately through the various opt-in methods. Look for ways to reduce data errors. This includes checking for misspells and duplicate entries.
- Limit email bounces and spam complaints through double opt-in methods.
- Segment inactive users for a welcome back campaign, and determine interest from response rate. This will also help determine which records can be deleted, and those that have potential for future marketing campaigns.
- Create internal processes and systems within your organization that enforce standards for inputting data. This includes streamlining integration between your marketing automation software and CRM systems.
- After running campaigns, regularly manage data hygiene through removing duplicates, inactive or incorrect addresses. This can be achieved through data cleansing
Most data quality problems are quite common, with many companies experiencing the same issues across various industries. Chances are, someone has encountered your problem before. A quick discussion can save a lot of time, help avoid mistakes, and motivate the team by showing that success is very likely. Here at Data Ladder, with all the common issues experienced across different organizations, we have encountered many different data quality issues on all different types of data.
A Success Story
One Indianapolis-based company that runs school marching band functions and festivals overhauled its email database.From a list of over 120,000 subscribers, the company cut it nearly in half to 54,000.
Using a combination of data cleansing, segmentation, and an archiving system, the updated list became an effective marketing tool that led to an increased email click-through rate of 60%, and led to a 28% increase in the forwarding rate.
Success stories like this are often found after systematic implementation of a sound data quality program. A good program doesn’t happen overnight…it begins with taking systematic initiatives at the beginning. It also takes governance and oversight to keep these initiatives in place. Over time, organizations that keep these programs in place will begin seeing measurable results — including increased revenue.
Improved data quality is about reputation management with your most important people – your clients. Data Ladder can help maintain your reputation and your data hygiene through effective data quality management strategies.
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About Author : This article is written by Mohd Sohel, He is software engineer and tech savvy news writer, He writes for all latest software and technology and participate on all high quality blogs like http://negosentro.net
