Let Your Data Guide Your Marketing 5 Ways to Transform Your Business with Better Data

Marketing data lies at the foundation of every successful marketing strategy. Data tells us who are best customers and prospects are, how to target them with the right offers and through the right channels, which messages will drive the most conversions, how to improve customer retention, and numerous other marketing initiatives. With the right mix of data, you can ensure that you are delivering the most optimal results for your business.

In order to create the perfect marketing strategy, you first need to fully understand who your customers and prospects are. This type of insight needs to go beyond data such as name, address, phone and email. Consumers expect you to know who they are, what they want, which channels they like to shop through, and the best time to communicate with them. This type of insight can only be achieved by utilizing your internal 1st party data and combining it with rich 3rd party data sets, both offline and online.

Heres a look at 5 ways you can transform your business with better marketing data.

Pay Attention to Data Quality

Marketers talk about the importance of good data, but in reality, records often contain incomplete or wrong data. Records may be missing basic data elements such as name, phone number, or email address. Data also erodes quickly and if you are paying attention to the quality of your data, chances are that much of your data is outdated.

The 2016 B2B Marketing Data Report by Dun & Bradstreet evaluated the state of B2B data and found some pretty shocking statistics. A gap analysis showed the following missing data elements in overall record health:

• 87% – Missing Revenue Info
• 86% – Missing Employee Info
• 82% – Missing Website Domain

B2C data is also plagued with errors, such as missing fields, outdated information or inaccurate entries. According to an Experian Data Quality Report, on average, U.S. companies believe 25% of their data is inaccurate. Poor data quality, for both B2B and B2C companies, is a direct result of not having a data management strategy in place. Additional finding from the report reveal that 66% lack a coherent, centralized approach to data quality. When a data management solution is in place, 64% of companies use third parties for their data quality strategy.

“66% of US companies lack a coherent, centralized approach to #dataquality.”

Use Data Enrichment to Append Your Records

93% of the Experian study respondents think some form of data is essential to their marketing success. Marketers stated that the top three types of information essential to marketing success are:

• 54% – Contact Data
• 44% – Sales Data
• 38% – Demographic Data

While existing data can be cleaned and corrected, missing data continues to be a constant battle for marketers. To gain these additional insights, 94% of companies use a third-party to append and enrich their data sets. The top three data sets businesses append are business data, geolocation data and demographic data.

Verify and Enhance Your Web Form Data in Real Time

Data gathered through your online web and registration forms provide valuable information into customers and prospects that are actively showing interest and engaging with your business. By capturing this data and integrating it into a lead nurturing system or other type of outreach program, businesses can covert these form fills into sales.

In addition to the email address, the top types of data marketers want to know include:

• 59% – First / Last Name
• 53% – Role/Title
• 39% – Company Name
• 32% – Phone Number

Of course, the data collected is only useful if its accurate and people actually take the time to complete the form. Often times, human error can lead to incorrect data or users will falsify information on purpose. Many users also wont fill out a form if its too long, so marketers are forced to choose which types of data are most important to collect.

A real-time verification service can be added to web forms or order entry systems to verify and correct this data at the point of entry and to shorten web forms. For example, email addresses can be validated as deliverable including auto correction of some common typos. Web forms can be shortened to only require a phone or email address and additional information can be populated such as address, email, or alternate phone numbers. In addition to identification information, any number of data elements can also be appended in real-time, such as gender, ethnicity, occupation, marital status, or vehicle information.

Put Your Data to Work

Consumers share tons of personal information and they expect you to collect as much of it as possible to customize their experience. You may have collected all the relevant pieces, cleaned and added missing information, but this data needs to be turned into actual insights to be useful.

Marketers must be able to answer questions about their customer and prospects such as:

• What do my customers look like?
• What products have they purchased and what is their purchasing behavior?
• Who are my best customers and what will keep them loyal?
• What is the best way to reach my customers and prospects?
• What patterns may indicate unhappy customers and how can I mitigate attrition risk?

The deeper your understanding of your customers, offline and online, including their buying habits and lifestyle preferences, the more accurate your predictions of future buying behaviors will be and the more successful you will be at delivering the right offers to grow your customer base and lifetime value.

“The best marketers ask questions about who their customers really are, beyond contact information.”

Integrate Data Across Both Offline and Online Channels

Todays consumers use multiple channels from initial research of a new product or service to final purchase. With the introduction of so many new digital channels, marketing hasnt caught up and data strategies are often divided between the offline world and the online world. Its not uncommon for a company to have a digital advertising department, a social marketing team, and a separate team dedicated to offline or print strategies.

However, consumers dont differentiate between channels and expect their purchase experience and every brand interaction to be seamless, whether they are offline or online. Research by Reponsys shows that customers tend to spend 30 seconds or less absorbing digital content, which makes it especially important to reach them across a variety of channels. Other research by Multichannel Retail shows that 40 percent of consumers said it was very important to have purchase choices both offline and online.

A VisionCritical study of leading social media platforms has found that social media encourages both offline purchases as well as online sales. Digital marketing can be used to boost trade show traffic. Or a print or TV ad can supply a Twitter hashtag to drive conversation to social media, while calls-to-action can direct viewers to online programs. The point is that marketers must reach consumers across multiple channels. By using analytics and incorporating segmentation and rich third-party data sources, marketing messages can be tailored to appeal to a consumers online and offline preferences.

According to a report by Forbes Insights and Turn, Data Driven and Digitally Savvy: The Rise of the New Marketing Organization, organizations that are leaders in data-driven marketing report far higher levels of customer engagement and market growth than their laggard counterparts. In fact, leaders are three times more likely than laggards to say they have achieved competitive advantage in customer engagement/loyalty (74% vs. 24%) and almost three times more likely to have increased revenues (55% vs. 20%).  Effective marketing strategies rely on a powerful platform of data to power the right connections with the right audience at the right time.