No matter the industry or campaign, marketing professionals can agree that understanding your target audience is crucial to success. Vital demographic data like location, age, marital status, and education will help you clearly understand who your customers are and where they are so you can better target them, capture their business, and ultimately achieve growth.
Knowing who your customers are and how to reach them are the best ways to ensure campaigns resonate and are delivered. Marketers with high-quality trusted data are powered with confidence that their marketing efforts are reaching the right people, at the right time and are more likely to see higher return on investment. A complete database with accurate insights allows markets to understand their customers’ needs and interests better, enabling them to personalize messages.
However, marketing data is the most vulnerable to data quality issues (consider consumers who are constantly on the go!). This is why data quality is essential to a thriving marketing strategy. Data quality can power businesses to optimize targeting efforts through the combination of demographic data, like location, with behavioral information like purchase history.
In this blog, we will dive into the benefits of data quality and how you can leverage accurate and trustworthy data to target the right demographics in your marketing campaigns.
The effects of poor data quality on your marketing campaign
Data is the driving force behind marketing strategy. However, poor data is costly and can have several negative effects on marketing campaigns, including:
• Inability to reach the right people at the right time
• Customer experience suffers from late or impersonalized messaging
• Increased costs (email bounces, inefficient mail practices, wasted time)
When contact information is entered by the consumer on a website or social media, it is often riddled with missing or incorrect details and typos. Our research shows that 69% of organizations say that they are collecting contact data through online applications and form fills. This collective of bad data can hinder your ability to reach customers when they are most likely to convert and create a poor customer experience from late or impersonalized messaging. Data can be a powerful tool to help you segment your audience based on demographics, behaviors, and interests to create a personalized customer experience. However, this becomes a challenge if your data is not accurate or complete.
Additionally, inaccurate data results in wasted resources and increased costs which could lead to ineffective marketing. Why? Poor data quality has negative impacts downstream from incorrect data-backed decisions, wasted resources, poor customer experience, and loss of revenue. This is why you need the proper tools to transform your data into actionable insights and empower you to profile, cleanse, monitor, and enrich your data.
How to leverage data quality for marketing
In today’s digital climate, consumers prefer and expect digital communications. As a result, businesses are focused on accelerating their digital strategies and have come to realize that contact data is a key asset to maximize outreach. Here’s how valid contact data powers marketers with the ability to improve overall performance and customer experience.
· Address – If you are planning to send customers marketing materials through the mail, you will no doubt want to ensure your address data is correct. Ensuring accurate address data helps you avoid lost mail and address correction fees.
· Email – While our research shows that 72% say email is the channel most relied upon to reach and stay in touch with customers, email addresses go stale at a rate of 3% each month. Email has long been used to maximize outreach and while that’s still true, businesses need to ensure the emails they collect are accurate to operate efficiently and create personalized connections with customers.
· Phone – Consumers are constantly on their phones, making it the best place to contact them with marketing communications. However, it’s common for people to disconnect their landline or have multiple cell phones for work and personal use. This makes it harder to maintain an accurate database of valid phone numbers, and even harder to ensure your campaigns, order updates, or loyalty program communications are reaching the right person and device. Having the ability to check if a phone number is active and valid, and mobile or landline, will allow you to save time and maintain better customer relationships.
Did you know that there are 820M changes across all contact databases every 90 days? On top of that, businesses are managing as many as 19 different databases at once. This rapidly increases the chances that your database is outdated, and your contact data is not actionable if it’s not regularly being properly maintained for quality. Implementing these data quality solutions will help equip your business with trusted data.
· Address Validation
· Email Validation
· Phone Validation
Data quality is key to targeted marketing success
With consumers constantly on the go and attached to their devices, demographic data is a powerful tool that enables marketers to get a better understanding of their customers, and, when combined with quality control, is the key to successful marketing campaigns. Our research shows found that 94% of business leaders see poor quality data impacting the organization. By understanding your customers’ demographics, preferences, behaviors, and pain points, you can make better, informed business decisions backed by data you can trust.
Now that you know the power of data quality in the success of your marketing strategy, it’s crucial to ensure success with accurate and reliable contact data. With a clean contact database, you can be confident that your marketing efforts are reaching the right people at the right time. That is where Experian’s verification solutions come into play. Get in touch with our data quality experts today to learn more about our products and how you can equip your business with trustworthy data to better drive your marketing strategy.
