Time and time again, research has proven that almost every database in a business contains duplicate data. These mistakes occur due to a variety of reasons. Data could have incorrect spelling, been added with abbreviations, or somehow altered phonetically. Spotting these errors however is not so easy to do manually when dealing with large volumes of data.
Incorrect data may seem just a small nuisance, but in marketing these kinds of mistakes can have massive impacts. More companies are facing reduced budgets in these times and the need to be smart with the data you already have has dramatically increased. Poor quality data can have dire effects on the ROI for even the most well executed marketing campaign.
The Importance of Reliable Data
In marketing, the data you hold about your customers is your biggest asset but can quickly become the weakest link in your campaigns. Deterioration of data quality is inevitable, and it’s applicable to practically all industries and market sectors. In fact, every year 32% of customer data decays.
In such a modern world things change daily; companies move or choose work from home models and people change jobs, get married or get divorced. It means if your data stays stagnant its inevitable you will be working with data that has little to no value down the line. The pressure however falls on marketers to keep data quality standards high enough that they avoid the risks of bad quality data such as productivity decline, loss of morale from not getting expected ROI’s and facing high operating costs.
Data in Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail in recent times has been overlooked with more people adopting email campaigns for its low cost and efficiency however, in a recent study 90% of direct mail gets opened compared to only 20-30% on average for emails.
UK consumers generate millions of pounds in postal sales per year and those who receive direct mail on average spend 28% more money than those who don’t.
The potential for direct mail when data is accurate is undeniably valuable. However, when looking specifically at the quality of data in a CRM, direct mail is perhaps the most vulnerable type of marketing activity. With communication relying directly on the customer data, low quality data poses a huge risk. Duplicate mail being sent is a real threat to both brand perception and costs.
Keeping up with the demand for personalisation
Personalised marketing is becoming the norm and expectation these days, in fact, 1 in 4 consumers expect a personalised experience and 76% reported feeling frustrated when this was not the case.
It means that the reliability of your customer data becomes all the more important. Personalisation is no longer to stay ahead of competition. It’s to keep up with them.
With large volumes of customer data, mistakes easily happen. Ask yourself though, would you have a positive response to an email with your name spelt wrong? It’s quite likely your customers wouldn’t appreciate it either. It’s just another reason why you should strive for high quality customer data.
High quality data provides accurate insights into your customers. With a single customer view and no duplicates, the trust in your data soars and personalising content becomes a simple no brainer task. In fact 44% of CMOs say that frontline employees will rely on insights from advanced analytics to provide a personalized offering, this is only possible with high quality customer data.
How to Clean Customer Data
If poor data quality is affecting a business’ marketing department, it’s probably impacting on the entire organisation. Together with management, marketers should:
- Set a clear structure for how they capture and handle customer data to prevent duplicates
- Clean up existing customer data and deduplicate where necessary
- Maintain processes to protect your company from GDPR fines and the data quality concerns mentioned in this article
Only then can the marketing department achieve that crucial single customer view to give their campaigns the best chance at success
