With so many different types of technology and data resources available, data-driven marketing can be a tough task for marketers to navigate. How can you create actionable insights with the data you have available? What are the best ways to keep and maintain data?
Here are the top five easy data best practices for your marketing:
- Performing data hygiene
- Applying analytics
- Building segmentation
- Creating versions
- Embracing multi-channel campaigns
If at any point you’d like to take a deeper dive into all of these topics, you should watch our webinar “Conquer Marketing: Easy Data Best Practices”.
Performing Data Hygiene
One of the key things you can do to ensure better results is clean up your data! Data hygiene services help you eliminate bad data and correct outdated records to ensure that you reach the customers and prospects you are trying to target.
Just look at these statistics about how bad data can impact marketing:
With the high cost of bad data, it literally pays to check your data thoroughly before trying to use it. Data hygiene is the first step to take whenever you’re getting ready to send out a new marketing offer.
In addition to cleaning up your data, you can also use hygiene services to take out customers or prospects you may not want to receive an offer, like underage children, people who have passed away and others.
Overall, the importance of data hygiene can’t be overstated. If you want to build a successful campaign, build it with good data!
Applying Analytics
When you need insights that can drive your marketing decision-making, analytics are a key factor to consider. Analytics is a powerful tool to define factors that are common among your best customers in order to find you the most qualified prospects, create a customized market penetration analysis and more.
Many marketers state that analytics has an impact on the decisions they are making:
In particular, understanding key demographics that are part of the make-up of your core customers can make it much simpler to define your third-party data needs and create targeted marketing lists of prospects likely to respond.
A SnapShot model provided by AccuData can even show you the top 10 most important attributes based on your current customer database.
Actionable insights provided by analytics data make it easier for marketers to make confident decisions about who to reach with marketing offers.
Building Segmentation
When you want better responses, segmentation is the way to do it. AccuData’s own database was segmented earlier in the year, and our email marketing results have been outstanding!
Related: Ten Email Marketing Design Trends You Need to Know
Segmentation is basically the idea of creating more niche targeted audiences, based on the characteristics that are important for your customer base.
For example, it could be identifying in your transactional data different price points customers respond to most and then segmenting the groups to send messages about different products to each. It could also be using generational marketing to speak different to Millennials versus Baby Boomers or other age-related segments.
At AccuData, we used different customer information like business size and titles for our contacts to create distinct groups we can message to differently based on their needs and challenges.
While segmentation works great, it is a challenge for many marketers:
However, if you’re properly maintaining your data with hygiene services and you’re using the added intelligence of analytics to pull in the best third-party data you can – you’ll already be tackling these segmentation challenges!
What that leaves you with is great data that you can segment in different ways to get robust increases in your marketing results.
Creating Versions
Hand-in-hand with the concept of segmentation is the need to create different versions of marketing offers. Once you have the ability to message to different groups, you need to be making them their own distinct marketing offers – and even taking things a step further to personalize the marketing you send.
Personalized marketing sees some of the highest response rates:
These statistics speak for themselves – it’s incredibly worthwhile to take the time to create different types of offers for different people – and when possible to personalize these. Some of the best marketing offers I’ve received lately are ones that are personalized in some way, such as birthday offers or ones that actually said my name right on them.
Remember, when you take the time and effort to put data best practices in place it helps you boost your bottom line, which is great for business and for keeping clients around!
Embracing Multi-channel Campaigns
The last best practice is the one that you definitely shouldn’t miss: multi-channel campaigns are the best way to drive results. If you take away nothing else from this, remember that you need to implement multi-channel campaigns.
Whenever you are creating a print marketing offer for a client, it’s time to start recommending a multi-channel approach. More people respond when you give them the option to interact with marketing in different ways.
Here’s why you should be using multi-channel campaigns:
Not only are more people making purchases on different devices, but the amount of money that gets spent by these consumers is higher. So, when you give them the option to interact with your campaigns in different ways, it creates more revenue.
Different combinations can be made to appeal to different consumers, but even simply following-up a postal campaign with an email to the same consumers can help make a difference. If you need help with creating an email campaign, we can help.
It’s simple to drive better results when you’re giving prospects more opportunities to respond.
Watch the Full Webinar
All of these great statistics and insights about data best practices appeared in our latest webinar, so if you’d like to learn more about these topics be sure to watch the recording!