Why Golden Records are Critical for Data-Driven Marketing

We recently wrote about the importance of data quality to marketers, noting that high-quality customer data is an absolute necessity when trying to understand customer wants and needs. This knowledge, in turn, translates to more personalized content and more-connected cross-channel campaigns, both of which improve the effectiveness of your marketing and engagement efforts and ultimately lead to better marketing results. So if your organization hasn't yet made high-quality data a priority, now's the time to do so.

For marketers at organizations already prioritizing high-quality data (or for those moving in that direction), it's important to understand that possessing high-quality data is really just the beginning of any sound data-driven marketing strategy. In order to properly analyze your data and uncover the accurate and actionable insights you need to boost engagement, build customers relationships, and drive sales, it's critical to first consolidate your customer data into "golden records" (also known as "golden customer records" or "the single source of truth").

Here's a look at why golden records are such an important part of data-driven marketing.

Before there can be a "golden record" there must first be a unified view of the customer

Achieving a unified customer view ensures (and assures) marketers are working with the most accurate and up-to-date understanding of their customers as possible. This then allows marketers to analyze historical customer behavior to better target and personalize future customer interactions. This can have a huge impact on the success of marketing campaigns, particularly in regards to message/content personalization, as it’s impossible to create engaging, personalized messaging without a clear understanding of your customers behaviors and tendencies -- which you can only uncover if you have a unified customer view.

Achieving a unified customer view is also essential for creating and maintaining "golden records," which are all-encompassing customer records that combine all the data you have on each customer into a singular form. Plainly put, golden records contain all the data you need to analyze and uncover how, when, where, and what to engage each customer with. Having a golden record for each of your customers also means no more time wasted tracking down data from across your various MarTech systems. Golden records also eliminate the threat of incomplete, outdated, and/or duplicate records being used during marketing analytics and campaign planning efforts, which can lead to inaccuracies that can severely impact marketing campaign performance and leave revenue on the table.

Use a CDP to make creating and maintaining golden records simple

Golden records offer a complete, accurate, and holistic picture of who your customers are and what makes them tick, and it's easy to see why they're such an important part of any modern data-driven marketing strategy. That being said, achieving a unified view of the customer and creating and maintaining golden records can be difficult without the right tools in place.

The issue is that many marketers (and even those outside marketing) often handle their customer data in a siloed manner rather than a connected one. The chief reason for this is that marketers are now using more systems than ever before to carry out the various aspects of their campaigns, and each system ends up storing its own valuable customer data within it. But this siloed approach to customer data prevents marketers from achieving the unified customer view needed to create golden records, ultimately preventing them from obtaining the clear understanding and insights needed to carry out personalized, targeted marketing campaigns.

Luckily for marketers, attaining a unified view of the customer and building golden records are both processes made easy with the right customer data platform (CDP). Advanced CDPs, like the one offered by us at QuickPivot, provide marketers with a single, centralized database to aggregate and store all of their disparate customer data, which is accomplished using out-of-the-box system connectors and APIs that integrate it with your existing MarTech tools.

The QuickPivot CDP is also able to combine existing pieces of data and customer records from across various systems to create a single golden record for each of your customers thanks to its identity resolution capabilities, capabilities which separate it from many other CDPs on the market which cannot create golden records. This means you can finally execute campaigns based on the most accurate and up-to-date data possible, and have the data you need to analyze the performance of those campaigns all in one place.

Additionally, the QuickPivot CDP improve data quality and boosts marketing results by:

1. Fixing data inaccuracies, cleanse records end-to-end, and match records from across your entire MarTech stack to provide you with data and insights that are up-to-date, accurate, and reliable.
2. Connecting your disparate data sources by automating and simplifying the data ingestion process.
3. Allowing for creative customer data segmentation, enabling you to manipulate and cluster groups of customers through combinations of demographic, geographic, transactional, and behavioral data.
4. Leveraging data from across your marketing stack to personalize your campaigns, so you can link the right customer to the right product, channel, or promotion, improving customer experiences at every touchpoint.
5. Providing robust, real-time data reporting that gives your organization clarity on both customer behavior and overall marketing performance.

The takeaway

The right CDP allows you to harness the power of all your marketing customer data, no matter the originating system. You can then turn it into powerful insights which allow you to create the meaningful, personalized customer buying experiences that keep them coming back. In a world where data is quickly becoming your most valuable asset, a CDP could be just what your organization needs to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.

So if you or your team is struggling with customer data management and unification, reach out today to learn why the QuickPivot CDP is the single tool you need to unlock the single source of truth at your organization.