Top 5 Data Do’s for a Happier Holiday Season
The holiday season is fast approaching, which means marketers at companies of all shapes and sizes are in the throes of planning an array of events and promotions designed to ensure 2022 sales goals are met or, fingers crossed, exceeded. To ensure your marketing data strategy brings you all the revenue your heart longs to generate, now is the optimum time to conduct a thorough data investigation and make sure that the information you are working with actually works. In the spirit of holiday wish lists, we’ve created a list of Top 5 Data Do’s that you can use to position your data to make this year’s marketing ROI purely magical.
- Do Introduce Your Data to All Other Tech at Your Party.
In the same way that it’s difficult to have a great time when you go to a party and your host forgets to introduce you; it’s tough for data to deliver results when it’s disconnected from all the other key players in your marketing technology stack. Make it your priority to see that your data is well-connected. Single out the siloes and outliers in your martech stack and introduce them to one another through intelligent integrations. Nowadays, you don’t need IT to connect your various platforms and systems and enable them to share data in smarter ways. There are plug-and-play integrations, as well as integrations that are designed to be easy to configure for custom connections.
2. Do Prep Your Data to Make a Grand Entrance With a Good Scrub.
You know those people at a party who repeat the same stories or call you by the wrong name every time they see you? You grit your teeth and bear their annoyances, all the while looking for a quick exit. Dirty data provokes the same responses in customers. When you have multiple versions of a contact’s information stored across multiple databases, you will inevitably have outdated information, as well as standardization problems. This will cause you to send contacts multiples of campaigns and communications, whilst addressing them by a variety of wrong titles, creative spellings, etc. To prevent customers from cutting off all communications, set up automated processes that monitor data quality and ensure it is kept perpetually clean, complete, standardized and enriched.
3. Do Dress Your Data for a Waterfall of Success.
It’s nearly impossible to look alluring to your Total Addressable Market (TAM), identify ideal customers, and reap the benefits of ABM-style personalized marketing when current research suggests that 40 percent of your database is either missing information or contains misinformation. That’s why it’s imperative that you use a waterfall enrichment approach to keep your data in peak performance condition. What is waterfall enrichment? It’s using multiple third-party data sources to continuously enrich all datasets. When you add waterfall enrichment to your data strategy, you empower your marketing team to push beyond previous limits and get a more complete picture of your customer. Broadening your data horizons will inevitably open up new streams of revenue by uncovering segments and customer characteristics that impact everything from lead generation and sales to repeat business, customer loyalty, and more. Your data management solution should provide a multi-vendor data enrichment strategy (enrichment waterfall) that ensures the best data provider for each field is used.
4. Do Take the Lead and Use Data to Create Delightful Customer Journeys.
Have you ever had a great meeting with a salesperson that you felt a genuine 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 data management strategy not only maintains data quality and tracks campaign performance, but monitors where customers are in the sales cycle and guides leads to the right rep at the right time. When you automate the process of managing leads throughout their pipeline journey, you won’t miss opportunities, send off-the-mark marketing pieces, or push potential customers into the welcoming arms of competitors, who understand the value of clean, complete and connected data.
5. Do Use Data to Make Communications Personally Engaging.
Nothing is as deeply satisfying at a party as being seated next to a person, who genuinely listens and responds in a way that lets you know they not only are interested in what you have to say, but truly understand you. Marketing pieces that provide content personalized according to customer interests, and that are communicated to them via preferred channels have the same impact. They let your prospective customer know you are a bonafide listener and you get them. Of course, being personally engaging to your adoring public is easy for folks like Elon, J-Lo and Oprah—they have staff for that. In the event your staff finds this idea overwhelming, it’s time to add a messaging tool to your martech stack. A good messaging tool automates the process of pulling and sending the right message to the right person on the right channel at exactly the right time. Being able to scale highly personalized marketing communication using the magic of automation is one of those rare gifts that is as wonderful to give as it is for customers to receive.