3 Reasons Better Quality Data Should Be on Your Holiday Wish List

The biggest shopping season of the year is upon us, and it’s a time that reminds us of what’s really important during the holidays (wink) — generating demand, engaging customers and closing more deals. Of course, none of those three magical occurrences is possible without high quality data. Like Santa’s demand for good behavior, good data is a ‘must-have’ requirement for fulfilling all your business desires. Conversely, those on the naughty list (businesses with bad data) can look forward to wasted budgets, missed opportunities, and a profit-sapping loss of confidence with customers whose experiences have been negatively influenced by duplicate marketing pieces, misspelled names, wrong titles and other bad data faux pas. To inspire you to aspire to Santa’s B2B nice list, we’ve gathered three reasons why enhancing your data quality should be a top priority this season.

1. Good Data Enhances Your Customer’s Experience

Leveraging good data isn’t just about keeping clean and up-to-date customer and prospect lists. Don’t get us wrong, clean data is incredibly important to your company’s ability to reach the right people at the right time; however, it’s the patterns and information that emerge from analyzing data that makes your high quality data a veritable goldmine. Good data is the sole source of all great insights, and these insights are essential to creating a more engaging customer experience.

To make insight mining easier, smart marketers use data dashboards. This tool not only gives you a central view of all your data and helps maintain its high-quality, it also tracks and records data on how your marketing campaigns are performing, as well as each customer’s individual preferences. By continuously monitoring data from website performance, you are better able to fine-tune your message and craft customer experiences that truly resonate. In addition, tracking customer preferences equips you with the kind of data and insights that allow for easy segmenting and enhanced targeting.

Example: A global company (and Sureshot customer) had enjoyed success with their email campaigns, but wanted to increase engagement. Their data revealed that many customers preferred receiving information by text, so they launched an SMS campaign that equipped customers with product reminders. As a result of acting on data insights, they saw an immediate increase in customer satisfaction, as well as a 10X increase in customer engagement. Data also enabled them to take an informed risk on a new approach.

2. Good Data Empowers You to Build Meaningful Relationships

One of the strongest desires all humans have is to be known. Each of us has experienced the terrible moment when someone, who you thought knew you well, did or said something that made you think, “This person doesn’t know me at all!” Unfortunately, this feeling is not relegated only to our friends, but includes the people and companies we do business with. Collecting quality information about prospects and customers is essential to your ability to build more meaningful relationships through personalized approaches.

When you use data to create marketing experiences that are tailored to your customers’ unique interests and needs, you reiterate to them that you are listening and attentive, two qualities that are in short supply these days, and yet both are deeply attractive. After all, when customers give you their data, they expect you to pay attention to it and use it wisely. In order to gather more personalized insights quickly, add a data enrichment tool to your martech stack. This will ensure that the data you are using to create more engaging personalized campaigns is complete, accurate and up-to-date.

The Power of Personalization

• 20% — Increase in sales when marketers personalize customer experiences
• 26% — Increase in email open rates with personalized content
• 87% — Customers who state personalized content positively influences their feelings about a brand
• 62% — Customers who expect companies to personalize offers according to their purchase history

3. Good Data Makes You a Smarter Decision-Maker

Researchers at Princeton, who were investigating how bad decisions are made found that, “erroneous decisions tend to arise from errors in the information coming into the brain rather than errors in how the brain processes information.”  In short, bad data leads to bad input, which leads to bad decisions and a bad outcome. The reverse is also true: good data leads to good input, which leads to good decisions and a good outcome. Whereas poor data quality often gives a false or incomplete view of a business situation, high-quality data is a confidence-boosting tool for uncovering insights that identify risks and opportunities. Using high quality data in your decision-making also leads to decisions that enhance overall strategies and operations.

A recent Fortune article revealed how airlines are using data to enhance their decision-making and increase customer satisfaction and profits. In one example, a United Airlines executive shared that the company analyzes and processes more than 150 customer variables, such as past purchases and previous destinations in real-time, and then uses this data to instantly generate personalized offers. By making more informed offers based on a customer’s collected data, United has increased revenue more than 15 percent.

To experience your own profit-boosting miracle this season, start by enhancing the overall quality of your data. Then, leverage it throughout the new year to build stronger customer relationships and make better decisions.