Dirty, dirty Data – necessary evil or the Fountain of Eternal Marketing youth?
Data seems to be coming to the fore again. In every context data forms the central part of every direct marketing campaign- be it off or online. In the ‘old days’ you had a very good reason to keep data clean and current – at the very least you saved the postage and production cost of your direct mail piece! With the advent of digital technology, have we as marketeers got lazy in our data hygience? It’s tempting to say yes, as many Organisations see online marketing as cheap, inpersonal and simply a cheap media choice. Yet those Companies that keep data clean, update email & postal addresses, capture interests, integrate with transactional knowledge ( who bought what & when) open the door to ‘Holy Grail’ marketing – the ability to create dynamic, personal and RELEVANT campaigns to every customer & prospect, every time. Little surprise that we see such high response and conversion rates for Clients where data is clean and the commuication is personally relevant. A check list of what you can do to keep data clean :
- Remove ‘unsubscribes’ from your data ( if you are one of our Clients this happens automatically)
- Download ’soft’ bounces and get them checked
- Capture all referrals and add them to your CRM data ( we frequently profile Organisations using this technique – it is amazingly powerful)
- Run an annual ‘cleansing’ – de-duplication, merging and updating data for incomplete,incorrect or missing fields, PAF files and against SIC code. This is a cheap service we provide but it repays the investment many times over.
- Integrate your web analytics with your CRM
New Business Generation – Has Digital & E-marketing had its day?
With marketing budgets getting tighter ( is that even possible?), unsurprisingly Marketeers must validate and account for every £ or $ they spend. The need to create, qualify and groom new business leads for Sales is the ‘de-facto’ measure for the performance of every marketeer. The Finance Directors challenge of ‘Prove your value to me’ is heard in Boardrooms throughout the land. So as Marketing Management, how do we decide to allocate our budget across the myriad of choices? Clearly the logical place to start is by using those media choices that deliver the most tangible, qualified results. Now no-one ever claimed that solus TV can create sales – more reasonably it can launch and support sales activity, even moving market share points through concerted effort. What TV can never achieve is a 2 way, on-going communication with a Customer, much less a prospect. Anyone remember Radion Automatic?? Launched in a blaze of TV and POS glory, the brand quickly died once TV and retail support was reduced to maintenance levels. When it comes to e-marketing, it’s hard to benchmark your own campaigns against industry norms. It’s even harder to then turn that into real metrics for evaluation of absolute value.
Sometimes the product, offering, target market or even price isn’t right. What is important is that the Client (through Purestone) can see this, react to it, craft different messages & strategies and respond to the results immediately. What other media choice allows you to change and tweak your creative, or copy, or call to action as the campaign goes out? I genuinely believe that e-marketing can make a difference to the business generation capabilities of any organisation. Those that treat e-marketing as a truly strategic media choice through which they make highly personalised, 1 to 1 campaigns can expect to achieve great results. Those that treat e-marketing as ‘blast, forget and hope something sticks’ – well, they still form an unenlightened majority of marketers. Treat your prospects as people, personalise your messaging to distinct groups and, surprise surprise, your results will rapidly improve.