Leveraging Marketing Data

Over time, as your marketing database becomes more robust, it can become one of your organization’s most valuable assets – but only if you do something with it.

Depending on your marketing objectives, here are four ways that you can leverage the data in your database:

Marketing Research

A complete and accurate database can provide you with a wealth of data to parse and analyze to help you understand your markets. Some of the most basic types of research to better understand your markets may include opportunities by geography (perhaps to assist in the alignment of sales territories), by vertical industry segments, or by market potential based on the size of the prospects. The better you understand the dynamics of your market, the more strategic your marketing efforts can become.

Personalization of Communications

Personalization involves more than just mail-merging, “Hello 'name' ”. Today, digital technologies allow for a much more relevant communication experience. Consider these examples:

Digital Print

Using your database, you can use digital printing to make the copy points unique and relevant to each person; insert images that relate to the individual, or even download directions from Google Maps to provide turn-by-turn directions from the prospect’s address to yours. By leveraging your data, you can take the “mass” out of “mass communications” but maintain a high degree of production efficiency.

Online Communications

Your database allows you to not simply maintain constant contact with your prospects and clients, but to engage them interactively through media such as email, mobile texting, web-based faxing and broadcast voicemail.

All of these technologies allow you to send out communications quickly and inexpensively, and some (like email and texting) invite response and interaction.

Plus, most of these web-based communications vehicles provide reports to help you keep your database clean, such as “hard bounced” emails or fax numbers that don’t connect.

Segmentation

Your marketing database will also provide you the opportunity to segment your prospects or clients for more targeted communications. For example, segmentation can be useful if a major competitor leaves a market and you want to target prospects in a specific area, or if you have a new product but it would only be applicable to specific market segments. If built properly, you should be able to segment your data based on any field of data you have collected.

Timing

If your prospects, or segments of your target audiences, have seasonal buying patterns, you can use the database to time the messages you send out so they are received when the prospects are more receptive to receive them. For example, an offer for auto insurance quotes will likely get more consideration when received at the time of a policy renewal than during the term of the policy.

We could go on and on with the many ways organizations can leverage the data they have collected on their market, but we think we made our point. The bottom line is that through proper planning and execution, marketers can gain knowledge, efficiencies and better results by leveraging their marketing data.

To learn more about database marketing, contact DMC Advertising at (800) 952-9165.

Data Hygiene Tactics

In our last Marketing Tip (Database Marketing Key Issues), we addressed the various sources of data that can be used to populate your marketing database. Regardless of the source of the data, an on-going concern you will need to address is the methods to clean and maintain your data.

There are many ways to approach data hygiene, but we have outlined some of the most common:

Check for Duplicates

Database marketing providers should have software to check your data for duplicates based off of any field, and identify those that are either exact matches or suspected matches for manual intervention. For example, are Bob Jones and Robert Jones the same person? If they have the same address, it may be safe to assume the records are duplicates, but if they have significantly different address, then they may be different. Also, if you want to only send one communication to a household, you may want to check for duplicates by street address.

Postal Delivery Software

There are postal delivery software programs that allow you to analyze your contact data to check for US postal deliverability. It will identify potential address issues and offer potential corrections. This will help assure that simple mistakes in encoding data are caught. It will also help assure that any direct mail initiatives will have a higher rate of success by assuring deliverability.

National Change of Address (NCOA)

When individuals move to a new residence and notify the Post Office to have their mail forwarded, that change of address is submitted to a limited number of National Change of Address (NCOA) organizations. Marketers can submit their contact data to one of the NCOA vendors who will provide information on the updated addresses.

Similar to the Postal Delivery Software, it will help improve deliverability by making sure direct mail pieces are sent to the correct address.

The service is also available for business addresses, but it will only help at the business level, not for individuals working for the business.

Data Appending Services

Occasionally marketers are interested in adding data elements to their database that weren’t previously collected (such as email addresses, fax numbers, etc.), or want to append new records that they didn’t have previously.

There are data service companies that will take your database, match the records against their database, and append the additional data elements to your database. While it rarely results in a perfect match, it provides a quick and inexpensive way to collect valuable new data elements.

Tele-research Services

Often time, especially with business-to-business databases, the best approach to securing accurate and timely data is to use telemarketing services. With well refined scripting, telemarketers can ask more probing questions to secure data or get information on multiple contacts within one company.

This type of service is significantly more expensive than the other electronic approaches, but depending on the nature of your marketing database needs, it can be very effective in providing a solid marketing database.

Using Feedback Mechanisms

Both direct mail and email have feedback mechanisms that can be used to identify “undeliverable” communications. Some postal classifications allow organizations to request information on undeliverable mail, and email service providers should be able to report on “hard bounces”. Organizations should develop an internal procedure to follow up on these undelivered communications to determine why they failed, and update the database to reflect the new information.

Need More Tips?

Applying techniques, such as these, will help organizations assure that their data asset will retain its value over time. DMC Advertising has over 20 years of experience in database driven marketing communications programs. For more information on database marketing or other marketing techniques, contact DMC Advertising at (608) 523-2000.