Great marketing starts with high-quality data, but to get great results, that data must be a resource you can trust. How do you make sure that you can trust the information you are working with? Here are five tips from Experian, which provides data profiling, analysis, and enhancement tools.
1. Profile it. You can’t have great data until you know what data you have. Profiling tells you what data exists within your database, what issues it might have, and enables us to help you create a road map for how to make it even better.
2. Standardize it. To gain accurate insights from your data (including identifying relationships and patterns to inform your personalization and targeting), it needs to be standardized—for example, someone’s birthdate. If your system has your customers’ birthdates stored in multiple formats, such as October 1, 1963, Oct. 1, 1963, 10/1/63, and 10/1/1963, the system won’t “see” them as the same.
3. Verify it. Great data is accurate data. Verification tools can check the validity of your data by running it against a series of algorithms or an external database.
4. Enhance it. The more you know about your customers, the more effective your targeting can be. Using third-party resources, you can add information that helps you better understand your customers and improve the accuracy of your messaging.
5. Consolidate it. It doesn’t do you much good to have some of your information in one database, some of it in another database, and parts of both databases in another. Not only does a fragmented approach make it that much harder to keep your data accurate and up to date, but each database only gives you a partial view of your customer. Is Susan Jones, who shops online the same Susan Jones, who buys from your catalog and in your store? You need to know. And if so, you need to ensure that everything you know about Susan is in the same place.
Your data is your greatest marketing asset. Let us help you make the most of it.
