Every marketing strategy is centered on data, right from an email campaign, webinar invitation, whitepaper download to form completion and sales follow-up. With the vast data available to marketers, they can target the right audiences with the right messages at the right time. But, managing this ever growing data and keeping the database clean and updated is indeed one of the biggest challenges for marketers.
In spite of knowing the benefits of good data management, marketers fail to keep their contact databases accurate and complete. As a result of which, their DMS gets filled with obsolescent data like wrong names, wrong numbers, businesses that have closed, incorrectly profiled businesses and more. Such inappropriate and inaccurate information, when delivered to clients will not be good for their reputation, and it may end up risking their customer base and strong business foothold. Maintaining in-house databases and at the same time keeping it well-managed is crucial for a marketer as it helps in generating positive ROI and predictable results.
Here are four practices to help you maintain and cultivate your database that will drive revenue and contribute towards developing effective marketing strategies.
Study Your Data
To cater to the need of different clients, you need to segment them on the basis of their requirement and deal accordingly. For a successful segmentation, you first need to analyze and review the contact and company information in your marketing database.
By analyzing your customer database, you get to know from which size company belonging to which industry is responding more quickly and favorably to your messages. To accomplish the task of analyzing data, marketers can make use of techniques like Recency, Frequency and Monetary Analysis (RFM) or can even outsource the work for a better outcome.
Assess Data health
As a marketer, you should scrutinize the state of your marketing database on a regular basis to understand the efficiency of your email deliverability, phone connect ability, and record completeness. Such health assessment will ensure that your marketing database is always up-to-date and devoid rid of outdated contacts.
Your data profile should be capable of addressing the changing demands of different types of organizations or buyers. But, if it doesn’t then it means that it has some loopholes that need to be fixed. Identifying this gap and filling it to make your database competitive is your job for which you have to maintain the health of your data.
Centralize Data from Different Sources
In any marketing team, information on leads, prospects, and other areas are collected from different sources and in different ways. But, managing this distributed data individually is complex and time-consuming. So, if you can centralize all of that data into one common outlet, then it will be easier for you to handle it. By doing so, you can make your data uniform and complete throughout the organization. Through normalizing your data all across, you can simplify the process of managing and analyzing your data that is bound to leave a positive impact on your revenue generation.
Follow a Routine
If you want to manage your vast marketing data and provide customers with accurate and relevant information, then you need to follow a proper routine of assessing, cleansing and enriching your marketing data throughout the year. It may not be on a daily basis, but it should be a continuous process that has to be carried out whenever possible, may be quite often because data changes every day.
With the evolution of Big Data, managing marketing data has become a tough job for most marketers. But, by following these guidelines they can successfully deal with their data management challenges and can efficiently maintain a well-organized database.
