With the increasing importance of information to marketers and advertisers, it’s vital to get your data management program right the first time. Data hygiene, data security, data enhancement – every aspect of your data governance strategy needs to be fully functional just to compete in the Information-Age marketplace. If you want to excel, you need to make sure you have the basics in place first.
Missing out on Personalization
It’s no longer enough for marketers to put information out and allow leads to find their way to it. Leads expect the companies with which they do business to know them and respond to them personally. Customization and personalization are no longer optional, particularly for B2B companies that depend on relationship-building over a lengthy sales cycle to earn their leads’ business. Data enhancement services that bring together information from disparate sources to fill in the blanks on leads’ accounts play a major role in improving conversion rates because they connect with potential customers at the high level of interest and engagement they demand.
Ignoring Email List Hygiene
More isn’t always better, at least when it comes to mass mailings to business email lists. The real danger of mailing to invalid addresses isn’t just the wasted time and effort of your marketing team; it also sends up a warning flare to email service providers that could influence how your mail appears even to valid addresses. Conversely, working from a clean email list sends a signal of trustworthiness to ESPs and recipients alike. A well-maintained list, whether it’s your house list or a third-party acquisition from a list broker, ensures that your message not only goes to valid addresses but to leads who are properly sorted and segmented to align well with your offer.
Over-Planning and Under-Performing
Marketing automation technology gives you a remarkable amount of prescience when it comes to planning out future campaigns, but even the most sophisticated systems make predictions based on current states of knowledge. Successful data-driven marketing must be agile enough to react to new information pouring in. If you’ve had your next two quarters planned, for instance, and suddenly find campaign elements that previously tested well no longer have the same impact, you need to know why and adjust quickly to the new data. One way to avoid being stuck in neutral while your competition races ahead is to work with a data enhancement team that has experience with emerging technology that can look at collected data with fresh analytical tools.
Failing to Plug Holes in Your Data
You wouldn’t read a novel that had some of its pivotal passages removed, but that’s what your customer account files are if you haven’t done the work of integrating and enriching data. Having a properly maintained house list is great, but having one that’s also more complete after data enhancement is even better. The key to filling in data blanks is working with a master database that contains enough records to match your information against verified sources such as the U.S. Postal Service. The more detailed your source database is, the better your data enrichment results can be.
Data-driven marketing mistakes can limit your growth at a critical point. Marketing is becoming increasingly dependent on technology, so don’t get left behind by relegating data enhancement and hygiene to afterthoughts.
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