How To Fix Data Disaster Before It Kills Your Campaign


WRITTEN BY

Vikas Bhatt

How To Fix Data Disaster Before It Kills Your Campaign

How To Fix Data Disaster Before It Kills Your Campaign

4 Easy Steps to Fix Data Disasters Before It Destroys Your Campaign

In the earlier post, we discussed the cost of bad data. If you read it, you have started to bother about the quality of your database EVEN IF your campaigns are doing well. Come on! Let’s not be satisfied with crummy results. Not only can you save 550 hours and as much as $32,000 per sales rep (and impress the C-suite), you can also boost the morale of your teams and skyrocket the revenue. 

What is the recipe for a successful marketing campaign?

We all agree that the focus of any marketing campaign is the customer. So, these three ingredients (without any doubt!) top the list

Data: How else will you gather information about your target buyers?

Content: A smart marketer will create relevant” content for the buyer? How do you know what is relevant? Data!

Engagement: You can engage a potential buyer ONLY if you have the right data.Unfortunately, more than 50% of the data in an average companys CRM system is outdated. Yes, thats right! Looks like a lot of B2B marketers are unaware of their target buyers. Without adequate data, the next logical question

  • How do you create a great marketing campaign that reaches the right people?
  • How will you know who to target and where to find them?

Thats scary but it is not uncommon!

Ways to fix data disasters

Follow these four steps to fix data disasters today.

1. DATA PROFILING Start by understanding the composition and quality of your existing database. Not only will it help you choose the right marketing method, it will also help you plan corrective steps. Wondering how? Let’s take an example. If profiling shows that only 10% of your records are less than a year old, you should focus on updating the information. If profiling shows that 80% of your phone records are verified but only 20% of the email addresses are valid, you can think of running a telemarketing campaign but not an email campaign. Ask yourself

  • Does the data conform to expected patterns?
  • Is the data complete?
  • Is the data usable?
  • Is the data accurate and unambiguous?

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2. DATA QUALITY

Start correcting, updating and validating existing data using –

  • DATA STANDARDISATION: As discussed here, standardizationcan help you address and correct permutations of data. For example, Only B2B ITES Pvt Ltd can also be recorded as Only B2B Ltd or Only B2B Private Ltd etc. Once data is standardized it becomes easier to analyze the business relationship with the entity.
  • FORMAT STANDARDISATION: Some pieces of information like social security, dates or phone numbers should be in a specified format.

3. DATA INTEGRATION

Now, the goal is to integrate information from your existing data sources. You can either merge data from various sources (for example, excel sheets of various teams) or merge new data (like purchased data). It helps eliminate duplicate records and consolidates data to give you a complete picture of your potential customer, this helps significantly to fix data disaster.  You also need to integrate data from sources that are less documented (like emails, phone calls, notes etc) to collect all relevant information about your customer. For example, you may know that person is the sales account manager but if you can understand his/her role, challenges etc you will create a bang on a campaign. 

4. DATA AUGMENTATION

Start supplementing the database with external data to fix data disaster. For example, start gathering data about family income, gender, hobbies etc or, use a demographics database to include revenue details, number of employees etc. You can also dig out details from various social media platforms. All of these will provide you useful insights on purchasing characteristics of the potential consumer. Once you start following these four steps before launching a campaign, you will never end up sending home improvement services to college students or send lipstick offers to male customers. What do you think about this? Do you have any tips and tricks to maintain hygienic data? so that you can avoid and fix data disaster. Please do share it with us.

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