Know your data, improve your marketing results

Marketing Ideaology is delighted to present Simon Daniels - Director at Percassity Marketing Data Solutions - who has provided an invaluable guest blog post on understanding marketing data in your business. The management of customer information is generally regarded as a crucial area to get right in order to be successful. So-called “customer relationship management” has moved from over-hyped fad to a mainstream marketing discipline in many organisations, but making effective use of this data has been the preserve of large organisations with matching resources. Their activities have raised expectations and now all businesses are expected to interact with their customers in a consistent, coordinated and streamlined manner. Punch above your weight in getting the most from information about your customers and prospects. All is not lost for the small business manager, as simple techniques and new low cost tools allow you to punch above your weight when it comes to getting the most from what we’ll call “marketing data”. Here are a few ideas for that can be implemented in your business straight away. 1. Gathering information Give up-front consideration to what information will be obtained and stored. Increasingly, data is collected online via website forms but is also likely to be gathered by other processes such as offline order taking or enquiries. It’s important to coordinate these collection points and ensure the purpose for each one is properly understood. • Collect data from websites using a form rather than simply providing an email address. This allows key information such as full name, location, contact details and the nature of the enquiry to be requested, rather than relying on the individual making an enquiry to volunteer these details. • Keep in mind what data is being collected for and why it is needed. Is a full address required for an enquiry? Perhaps just a region is needed in order to pass the enquiry to a local office or depot. • Use pick-lists for questions with a set number of options such as product type or, again, region. This will ensure consistent answers that are easier to sort, summarise and act on. • Don’t ask too many questions at once. Often, there are lots of things you’d like to know about your prospects such as industry, age, area of interest and so on. Trying to collect too much information at once can put people off though. Obtain the information you most need and then ask further questions in subsequent interactions to fill in the gaps. • Use an inexpensive address completion solution (such as Postcodes Anywhere) to collect addresses based on Postcode. This will improve the quality of addresses entered on your website, which will help ensure deliveries are more reliable and make it easier to complete the web form. 2. Storing A variety of solutions exist for storing marketing information, from Act!, installed on your own PC, to Highrise, which holds data on a central server accessed via the web. The benefit of the latter is easy access for multiple users and there’s no need to set-up a server. Regardless of the solution chosen though, proper planning of the information to be held and how it will be structured is crucial. • Ensure your database is set-up to hold the information being collected through your website and other routes. This means not just the right fields, but field types (date, numeric, text), length and pick-list values. • Investigate whether it’s possible to hold transaction information in your marketing database. This means information about orders including products and services, the value and when a purchase occurred. This can be used to build a picture about your customers (see next section). • Where order information is held in another system, see whether you can use a shared reference number between the ordering system and marketing database. You might need to manually copy this between them and it might require a little expertise using a database tool, but once the link is in place, it will be much easier to match up data across the two systems. And once the link is there, it will be much easier for someone to do this for you. 3. Understanding The point of structuring your marketing data is to gain a better understanding of customers and prospects, which can be used to win new sales with much less effort. • Use the information that has been collected about customers and prospects together with past orders to group together those with similar characteristics or who have bought related products. This is known as segmentation, and allows much greater relevance in the offers and messages that can be sent to each group to be achieved. Buyers of product A may have no interest in product B but might be receptive to product C. Equally, different groups might find one feature of more interest than another one, so your could perhaps send different emails to each. A bigger discount could be offered to higher spending customers only. • Enhance the information held about customers and prospects, by having your database matched to an external source (such as Dun & Bradstreet or Experian ) that holds additional details like industry or income. This information can be added to your database and included within your segmentation. •Take this analysis further using either familiar tools such as Excel or more advanced software. This becomes most worthwhile where there is a large amount of transactional data, although specialist skills will be required for more sophisticated approaches. 4. Quality As your database grows and is maintained over time, you may start to find certain issues creeping in that affect the quality of the data. These may range from duplicates (more than one version of the same contact or company), missing information, invalid names and so on. Keep an eye out for these problems as they can affect the success of marketing activity and create a lot of work in the long run. • Issue guidelines to everyone using the database on how to enter standard information, especially abbreviations, company endings (Ltd, plc etc), addresses and so on. • Every so often, perform a data extract, consisting of the main fields from the database, and open it in Excel. Here, you can undertake some simple data checks like sorting to see whether any 'odd' values appear at the top or bottom of the list, looking for empty fields where you wouldn't expect to find them and using the filter option to group values in a field together to ensure there isn't any rogue data. • More advanced data manipulation can be performed in Excel with add-ons such as ASAP Utilities which provides a range of text manipulation and error correction tools. • Pay particular attention to the age of data. Contacts in a database can go out of date at a rate of 25% per year or more, so data which is more than a couple of years old may well be out of date. Aim to keep track of response to previous activity and don’t “flog a dead horse”! 5. Privacy and data protection No discussion of marketing data management would be complete without mention of privacy and the Data Protection Act. A good source of information is the Information Commissioner’s Office. For a good source of updates on privacy matters (and anything relating to marketing law) try Marketinglaw.co.uk. The rules relating to whether an opt-in is required can be complicated, but in fact the best approach is always to get opt-in anyway. That way you know that the recipient actually wants to hear from you which will have a big impact on response rates and “conversion” – the act of buying something having received a message from you. Conclusion Managing marketing data can be a big undertaking with many different things to consider and opportunities to exploit. Good planning and careful thought to what you are trying to achieve though will be rewarded with greater customer loyalty and more engagement from prospects, which ultimately adds up to a successful business. Simon Daniels A specialist in marketing data strategy and operations, Simon’s experience spans a number of sectors, working across Europe and North America. Simon has been responsible for data strategy development, CRM and marketing automation system implementation, analytics and data quality initiatives. A co-founder of marketing operations consultancy Percassity Marketing Data Solutions, Simon also assumes the guise of "Marketing Insight Guy", an independent website and blog with thoughts and information on his experiences working with marketing data, systems, processes and analysis. Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology Blog for JupiterJasper, an on-demand marketer service for startups and small businesses.