Thursday, June 11, 2009

Is Data Quality the "New Black"?



Anytime I talk about data quality with a marketer, I always get the answer “yes that’s really important, but i don’t know where to start as we have so many problems and we don’t have the resources”. Well I believe that now it is more important than ever to implement a data quality plan, as the success of your campaigns depends on it. In fact it is so important, that I believe data quality will be the “new black” for this season of marketing campaigns.
We have found that customers that focus on data quality generate 267% more leads that those who don’t.

Why would that be? Quality data drives your segmentation and targeting, personalization and more accurate lead scores. All of these things help deliver higher quality leads to your sales team.

Let me walk you through the top 3 things you should do to maximize data quality:

  1. Identify the sources of all of your new data and prioritize the quality level of data from each of those sources:
    a. Your CRM system may be top priority
    b. But a list from a new sales rep may be lower priority

  2. Standardize the fields and values you are getting from those sources – whether it is fields on a form, or the information you are capturing at a trade show
  3. Finally put a system in place that cleanses new data to a minimum standard, “inline” as new contacts are added to your system – this is the critical part of the solution. Steve wrote a great article on the inline data cleansing concept or contact washing machine in April.

With these three steps you will ensure to be in vogue with this season’s marketing campaigns.

BOOK
Many of the topics on this blog are discussed in more detail in my book Digital Body Language
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In my day job, I am with Eloqua, the marketing automation software used by the worlds best marketers
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4 comments:

Amit Varshneya said...

Absolutely agree about the importance of Data Quality. That's the basis of all online campaigns and determines their success.

We're going through a similar exercise - putting in place a "Data Washing Machine". It's not easy or quick, but the benefits from even small improvements are substantial.

Steven Woods said...

Amit,
Great to hear - it really can make a huge difference if you get data cleansed first rather than dealing with it on each campaign/rule/segment. Excellent that you're seeing the results.

Paul Teshima said...

Amit, yes it is great to hear you realize the value of DQ and are putting a "washing machine" in place.

It would be great after you have some more results if we could compare notes.

Reach out to me anytime.

Paul

Amit Varshneya said...

Sure Paul, Will do. I would actually want to share what we did and the results we saw in a user group meeting maybe.

And I take back what I said in my comment above "that's the basis of all online campaigns..." - data is actually the basis for *all* campaigns. :)

Amit