5 ways to better leverage your data

Being a Marketer myself, I know that we are nothing without our data. We are constantly looking to understand, improve, and leverage data in new and exciting ways to drive revenue for our business. We connect with our friends in Analytics or Business Intelligence to help us make visuals to share information and insight about our data, all of which takes time and resources from multiple teams.

I wanted to take the opportunity to share my 5 tips for better leveraging your data, from a data quality SME perspective, but also as someone just like you, who needs to deliver results from data.

1.    Make sure your customer data is complete and accurate.
   Have you ever found yourself delivering a presentation, only to realize halfway through that something in your data is incorrect? Do you remember how quickly the room stopped listening or became skeptical? While mistakes happen, there’s no excuse when it comes to the quality of your customer data. Work with a trusted partner, like Experian, to ensure your data is formatted correctly, you have customer emails, addresses, etc. We don’t expect you to be the expert; that’s why we’re here to help.
2.  Proactively monitor any potential issues with your data.
   We work with many Financial and Public Sector customers. From a compliance perspective, they are constantly working to identify potential issues with their data, such as: social security numbers in incorrect fields, age ranges below 18 and over 120, or balances that exceed credit limits. What if you don’t have the regulatory pressure that a bank has? What you likely do have is a data warehouse, or CRM that you have invested hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into. Since their purpose is to hold your data in an effective way, don’t you think you should have monitoring processes to anticipate issues and protect that investment?
   
   
3. Set up dashboards, alerts, and workflow management. 
   Many organizations have started to give full access of data to their employees to empower new insights. While this is a great advancement, it comes with its own challenges. By setting up something like workflow management in your processes, you can hold your users accountable to your data standards. Have you ever been asked which users, departments, or channels enter the most inaccurate data?  What if you could quickly consult a dashboard to answer the question quickly and accurately.
   
   Now that you know how to keep your data accurate and secure, we can get to the fun tips.
   
   
4. Learn more about your customers and prospects in real time.
   At Experian, we have lead scoring in place to help us identify when our prospects are ready for us to engage with them. This model will look different for every business depending on your market, resources, sales cycle, etc. If you are B2C, I highly recommend using 3^rd party data – based on the attributes you care most about—to score your incoming leads. If you knew your lead’s household income, how much more effectively could you market to them? Would you send them different messaging, or give them a specific offer? Without this information, you’re treating everyone the same, and in a world where personalization is key, you’re not setting yourself up for success.Many think this process is painstaking and out of their price-range to set up. I think you might be surprised at how easy we make it. You can start with a few attributes and see how it goes from there!
   
   
5.  Build customer personas off actual data.
   I’ve been in conversations time and time again where a business is talking about their ideal customer profile, only to be proved wrong when the data is analyzed. Making assumptions will do no good when it comes to customer personas. The good news is we all have more transactional data than we know what to do with and you can use the fore-mentioned 3^rd party data to fill the gaps. Take the time to build these models with your analytics or business intelligence teams and use that to inform your customer personas. By making assumptions, you could be costing your business more than you know.

Making your data actionable is a priority for your business. These five tips will help you get started to make sure your data is accurate, that it adheres to the level of quality you expect, and that you are maximizing its value for your organization. Effectively leveraging your data can help you improve customer service and create new opportunities for your business. Experian can help you identify how to leverage your data to get the most out of it.

Want to talk data strategy?

Contact us today