The success of your marketing campaigns is closely tied to the quality of the data you use. Poor quality data can lead to ineffective strategies and wasted resources. To ensure that your data is reliable, you should focus on data accuracy and completeness. Here are five tips for getting it right.
1. Clean and Update your Data
Does your data need some spring cleaning? It’s important to regularly clean and update your customer list to be accurate, complete, and up to date. By keeping an eye on your data, you can ensure that there are no scam names mixed in with valid leads, which could lead to campaign success–but only if they arrive at their destination! Scheduling a routine mailing list cleansing and updating could be the key to those successful direct mail campaigns of your dreams.
2. Enhance your Data
Understanding your customers and increasing the relevance of messages doesn’t have to be complicated! Obtain demographic or behavioral data beyond just a name and address to enhance your data and get more out of it. Get third-party resources to learn more about your customers and create marketing segments that are accurately tailored specifically to them. This kind of information adds detail, allowing you greater access to new learning experiences and more activity opportunities. Utilizing this strategy guarantees maximum impact with personalized content for individuals in your target audiences so you can reach people on a deeper level. Do more with customized approaches based on behavioral demographics to ensure an engaging experience for every customer.
3. Verify Your Data
Are you looking to purchase additional data for your campaigns? How can you be sure that the data will be accurate and reliable? Verifying your data is a straightforward but essential step that needs to happen before any successful campaign. Simple verification tools can compare the data against a series of algorithms or access an external database to ensure each piece of information is critically accurate. Confirm with the third-party data provider that they have done this before adding new data sources to your campaign.
4. Consolidate It
The goal should always be a unified view of your customers. Is the Susan Jones – who shops online – the same Susie P. Jones, who buys from your catalog? You need to know. If it is, ensure that everything you know about Susan is in the same place.
Keeping your data organized can be a real challenge with so many departments using different or incomplete datasets. Maximize the value of your data by unifying silos of information within each department.
Access to a complete, 360-degree view of each customer will facilitate holistic business decisions rather than those made in an isolated environment. Are the same customers, individuals, or companies active across multiple platforms? Does that particular shopper commonly purchase online or offline? How often are they purchasing, and do they always buy the same product during each sale? As these details become more refined, so grows accuracy and actionable intelligence.
5. Standardize It
Having standardized data is essential for uncovering vital and meaningful information, such as relationships and trends, to aid you in personalizing your interactions with customers. To illustrate, consider a customer’s birthdate being inadvertently stored in multiple formats: October 1, 1963, Oct. 1, 1963, 10/1/63, and 1/10/1963. While birthdays are great data to have on customers, the varying formats make the information only partially useful, at best, as it likely won’t be recognized by any system.
Data is only useful if its storage is consistent and standardized.
Make the Most of Your Data with PMI
Your data is your greatest marketing asset. Let us help you make the most of it. At PMI, our team of talented design-driven professionals has been providing high-quality creative marketing services to businesses for over two decades. Reach out to us today, and let’s start putting your great data to work!
