8 Ways Data Quality Is Sabotaging Your Company’s Marketing Success – Part One
The statistics concerning marketing data quality are alarming. The Harvard Business Review maintains that the annual cost of bad data in the U.S. ALONE is more than $3.1 trillion. It’s a lot of money. To put it into perspective it’s the equivalent of nearly 15 percent of our current national debt. What’s even more ludicrous is that taking care of data hygiene for marketing is a problem that can be solved quickly and easily with just a few steps. If you’re not convinced that poor data quality is the mother of all marketing evils, or you have some people on your team that need convincing, we’ve assembled a short list of the eight ways bad data is beating up your marketing efforts across all playing fields and stealing your company’s lunch money on a daily basis.
1. Annoying Customers
Marketing is a delicate romance, and every point of contact could be your last if you appear to be too eager, a bad listener, or worse only interested in yourself. The way to put the kibosh on a great relationship is to have multiple versions of the same contact’s information stored across multiple databases throughout your company, which will cause you to send that contact multiples of all your campaigns. Imagine getting sent a stack of the same emails, texts, direct mails from someone you thought you knew. Yeah, you’d be turned off, too. Swipe left.
Quick fix: Use a solution, like Command, that supports your efforts to master data management for Eloqua and other marketing automation platforms (MAPs) by connecting all your data sources. Then, scrub your lists until you can see your face in them.
2. Creating Disconnect
Did you know that most B2B databases are filled with misinformation? That’s right, nearly 60 percent of all B2B databases are “unhealthy,” which is a polite way of saying the data is total rubbish. These days, people change jobs, titles and companies at the rate that most people change home air filters. If you aren’t scrubbing your list on a quarterly basis to eliminate bad data, like wrong names and titles, you are in serious danger of demonstrating to customers and prospects that their life, career and achievements are not important to you – only the sale. After all, it doesn’t matter that you personalized a campaign if the personalization is outdated.
Quick fix: After validating the data on your lists, use an integrated tool that provides data enrichment for Marketo and other MAPs to fill in the blanks and give you a more complete and accurate picture of your customer.
3. Missing Opportunities
Have you ever had a great meeting with a salesperson that you felt a genuine business connection with, signed a contract, and then continued to receive marketing pieces from them trying to convince you to buy something you’ve already bought? Yeah, we all have. A good, clean database provides insights on demand and tracks campaign performance, as well as where customers are in the sales cycle. A dirty and disconnected database cannot show you where customers are in the pipeline, which causes you to miss opportunities, send marketing pieces that don’t make sense, and hand off great opportunities to your competitors, who know the value of clean and connected data.
Quick fix: A good data dashboard is like a crystal ball that actually works. It can reveal insights, track trends, and website campaign performance, and make you look like an omniscient big data guru.
4. Wasting Money
Sure, your company’s stake in the 3.1 trillion flushed down America’s business toilets each year (thanks to bad data) may be relatively small in comparison, but in this economy, every dollar counts! Why waste money on stupid things like postage spent on sales gifts being sent to the wrong addresses and contacts, or multiples of expensive print pieces being sent to customers who are less impressed and more annoyed at what appears to be a thoughtless waste of resources. Another money vampire nursed by bad data is performing data corrections and updates manually. This is not only a gross misuse of your team’s valuable time, but a practice that actually leads to more errors entering the database, since humans always make mistakes.
Quick fix: Take a smidgeon of the money you would have wasted on bounce backs, bad postage and lost productivity, and buy a smart tool that supports data management for Eloqua, Marketo, and other MAPs. It’s the only way to keep your data in fighting shape.
Up Next: Be sure to catch Part Two of this story, where we unveil four additional ways bad data is gumming up the works in your otherwise flawless marketing strategy. We’ll also share a few quick fixes you can implement to stop bad data from sandbagging your marketing campaign results.