There’s no doubt that data is critical for success in today's marketing world. All the personal information related to your organization’s target audience regarding their preferences, interests, demographics, and past and current behavior is what can help you create more successful marketing and advertising campaigns. And it’s essential for marketers to collect this data and be able to uncover actionable insights from it, at speed and at scale.
Not just any data -- high-quality data
To effectively understand and meet customer wants and needs, it’s imperative that marketers harness high-quality data in order to understand and engage their customers. And frankly, if it’s not reliable and accurate data it’s pretty much meaningless.
However, research shows that while marketers recognize the need for high-quality data to create successful marketing initiatives, they often struggle to achieve it. A 2019 Forrester report showed that while 82% of companies place a high priority on refining data quality, more than 25% of all marketing campaigns were hurt by substandard data. And recent Gartner research found that organizations believe poor data quality to be responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses.
Poor data quality has a significant business cost in terms of time, effort, and business reputation. Poor data quality can cause your organization to make incorrect conclusions about customers’ needs and wants, and as a result deliver inaccurate or inappropriate marketing communications or product recommendations, then customer satisfaction suffers. And frustrated customers often share their negative experiences far and wide, harming business reputation.
What are the main benefits of high-quality data?
Organizations that prioritize and ultimately achieve good data quality can expect to see many benefits, such as:
More personalized content. Analyzing customer data helps marketers uncover insights into the driving forces behind customer shopping habits and responses to marketing tactics and to use that knowledge to better engage them with personalized outreach. And personalized communication helps to create positive sentiment, which in turn creates happy, loyal customers. In fact, research from Boston Consulting Group found a direct correlation between the level of personalization retail customers experienced, the number of items they purchased, and the average order value of those purchases. Bottom line: better personalization leads to greater profits. And good data quality leads is what facilitates best-in-class personalization.
Improved cross-channel marketing. Today's customers have more choices in where they shop than ever. That’s why it’s important that marketers connect with them on the channels that they frequent, and also have an actionable understanding of how customers are using these channels. By analyzing high-quality data for behaviors such as email engagements, visits to a company page, or usage of promotional materials, you gain direct knowledge of the content that appeals most to their customers and their preferred channel for receiving it. Therefore, you can better target customers based on their preferences and maximize the effectiveness of cross-channel campaigns.
A more unified view of the customer. Customer profile unification is critical because it ensures clean data with as few disparate pieces of data as possible. Considering you could be handling thousands of customers records (or more) spread across multiple systems in your technology stack, multiple profiles of a single customer can cause unnecessary confusion and lead to errors or mismatches. Customer profile unification creates a unified view of the customer – and having a single, holistic record that contains the details of every engagement customers have with a business is essential for world-class customer experience.
Time savings. Last but not least, let’s talk about the day-to-day life of a marketer: too much to accomplish and not enough time in which to do it, right? Well, good data quality can help. Knowing that your data is relevant, accurate, timely, consistent, centralized and unified, means you’ll cut down on superfluous work and ensure that your marketing resources are being used to their maximum potential. Smarter marketing = time saved.
The takeaway
Equipped with high-quality data, you're able to gain a better understanding of your customers (their needs, wants, expectations, and behaviors), which allows you to more successfully engage customers and drive sales and revenue.
Here at QuickPivot, we believe that managing and analyzing high quality customer data doesn't have to be difficult, which is why we designed the QuickPivot customer data platform (CDP) to make those tasks intuitive and easily accomplished. CDPs are designed to handle rapid data integration from both offline and online sources, and provide marketers with real-time insights. The QuickPivot CDP can take data from many disparate sources, clean it, unify it and turn it into accessible, actionable marketing insights.
If you're a marketer and struggling to get a handle on your customer data or would like more information on how a customer data platform can help support your marketing needs, reach out to us today.
