What Everybody Ought to Know About Data Management

For marketers effective data management is the backbone for accurate segmenting, targeting and positioning; making realistic projections; tweaking campaigns to increase ROI; and accelerating sales funnel. To make the most of carefully crafted marketing messages, a consistent, accurate and reliable source of contact information should be the foundation for marketing programs. With good data, you can make sure that marketing messages reach the right people at the right time.

When marketers have the correct data, they can forward sales-ready leads to the sales managers. Additionally, sales forecasting, pattern recognition, tracking performance of teams, understanding where in the pipeline the prospect is can be done much better. Sales managers can easily identify risk, bogus deals and underperformers.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Cost of Badly Managed Data

Bad data or poor data quality costs US businesses $600 billion annually!

In a study conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University, fewer than 10 percent of organizations use documented processes to manage their data, and fewer than one in three organizations claim confidence in their own data. With poor data, companies have to cope with:

• Low email deliverability
• Poor campaign performance
• Missed opportunities
• Escalating data storage and maintenance costs
• Inefficient workflow processes
• IP reputation loss

What is Data Management?

Data management is the development, execution, supervision of plans, policies, programs and practices that control, protect, deliver and enhance the value of data, and information assets. Data management has six building blocks:

1. DATA CAPTURE:It is the first and recurring step for good data management and is highly critical to accurately attribute a sale, track consumers’ buying patterns, and plan better marketing plans.Data capture is essential to build a database that is truly representative of your audience. Data capture needs to be broad, deep, regular, quality, innovative, consistent, and streamlined.Data capture can happen via:

• Onsite forms and surveys
• Newsletter signups
• Display and behavioral advertising
• Events
• POS
• Print campaigns
• Offer subscription
• Commercial partner’s emails and websites
• Social networks
• And more

Tip: Do not ask for everything at once – build it up over time using combinations of touch points.

• DATA CLEANSING/DATA CLEANING/DATA SCRUBBING:Data cleansing can help you avoid situations like these.“Your target organization has a title known as Business Account Manager but due to structural changes all Business Account Managers are now Account Managers. Other changes are in responsibilities and decision making powers, resulting in a new segment altogether. A new segment is added in your database but the old one is not removed. Due to this oversight; your marketing team is designing and delivering marketing collateral to the old segment!“As per Reachforce, B2B marketers without a plan to clean their dirty data may waste on average $80,000 to $90,000 for a database of 100,000 records. A plan for good data involves, amending or removing data in a database that is incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted like syntax errors or typographical errors, and duplicated.Clean data is a prerequisite for email marketing, improving outreach, buyer profiling, segmentation, and more.Tip: Document your data maintenance processes to ensure data hygiene.
• DATA VALIDATION:Without data validation organizations can expect an error rate of 2% to 8%. Validated data helps you save millions by ensuring information gathered is clean, accurate and standardized. With data collection volume increasing by 400% on a yearly basis, data validation needs to be applied at each step of data gathering.Various levels at which data validation checks can be enforced are:

• Forms
• Fields
• Saving the data
• Search Criteria
• Range

Tip: Use tools like Rapportive and LinkedIn to validate your existing data.

• DATA ENRICHMENT/DATA AUGMENTATION:Marketing and sales data decays at the rate of 30% every year. Nevertheless, you need to make the most out of your existing data. Enriched data adds consistency and completeness to your marketing data repository helping you to better target your prospects. Enrichment process leaves behind data that is accurate, up-to-date and usable for all your marketing activities.
  Enrichment helps you reach the right customers, maximize the effect of communications, achieve highest match rates, lower bounce rates, and expand customer insights.

Additionally, with enriched data you can:

1. • Define unique characteristics of your best and most profitable customers
   • Anticipate likely future behaviors and buying trends
   • Identify new revenue sources and opportunities
   • Separate your greatest opportunities
   • Range

In short, with data enrichment, you can ensure users can direct controlled adjustments to data to increase its usability.

Tip: Use tools like Hoover’s and Zoominfo to enrich your existing data.

• DATA MIGRATION:Migration involves moving large amounts of data, designing a database or just making data useable for marketing purposes by leveraging a new platform. Typically, data migration involves and helps with:

• Manipulating Data Sets
• Setting up Data Feeds and Updates
• Data Architecting
• Data Extraction and Synchronization
• Connecting Disparate Data Relationships

Tip: Prioritize data that needs to be migrated. Migrating everything to the new platform can be counterproductive.

• DATA VERIFICATION:Data verification can be used to ensure that data is at the right place. Verification ensures accuracy of company names, mailing addresses, phone numbers & other demographic data. Additionally when done after migration, this process can check and help restore data loss.
  Tip: Customized reporting for data verification ensures that you get best results.

Key Takeaways

Data management is like a hub and all the building blocks are like spokes. Each spoke is crucial. Summarizing the post, we can say:

About Grazitti’s Data Management Services

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