8 Ways Data Quality Is Sabotaging Your Company’s Marketing Success – Part Two
In Part One of this story, we showed you just how evil bad data can be, from annoying customers and creating disconnect, to making your money and opportunities go missing, to costing U.S. companies over $3.1 trillion per year. Yes, you read that right – $3.1 TRILLION! Unfortunately, we were just getting rolling on the bullying exploits of bad data. To find out four more ways bad data is sucker-punching your marketing results, read on.
5. Appearing Incompetent
Everyone knows that staying relevant in today’s competitive landscape requires you to build quality relationships anchored in trust. So it makes no sense to take a wrecking ball to all that hard work by sending prized clients incorrect account information, thanks to a dirty database. What’s worse is that oftentimes when a client calls customer service about receiving incorrect account information, the first place the misfortunate reps look is to the very database that created the drama in the first place. Moreover, if reps haven’t been trained that the customer is always right (not the database) they can inadvertently add to the growing distrust your client feels and make your company look incompetent.
Quick fix: Connect your data across the company using an integrated cloud-based solution that supports data hygiene for marketing and enables customer account updates to be viewed in real-time.
6. Slow Motion
If your database is morbidly obese, expecting it to run at normal speeds when performing the simplest of tasks is like forcing yourself to run a marathon after a Thanksgiving binge at grandmas. Just as too much food makes us bloated and slow-moving, bad data is the number one contributor to bloated databases that move at a glacial pace. The good news is, unlike us poor humans, you can whip your database into Olympic condition in one day simply by doing a cleanse. Once you dump all the bad data from your system, unless your database is stored on a Commodore 64, you will notice an immediate uptick in speed and responsiveness.
Quick fix: Good data is the heart of smart decisions. Keep your data heart healthy by using a comprehensive tool that eliminates duplicate and bad data enterprise-wide and enhances data management for Eloqua and other marketing automation platforms (MAPs).
7. Bounce Backs
When bad data causes you to send marketing pieces to the wrong addresses, or to customers who have opted out, you can get your marketing goals, strategy and budget into all kinds of trouble. First, ignoring bad data increases your bounce rates, and as if all those wasted opportunities and misfired messages weren’t punishment enough to your goals, high bounce rates can lead to spam violations, which can cause your IP address to be blacklisted as a spammer. Aside from sullying your reputation, being blacklisted puts your company on the radar of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which issues more fines than a deputy sheriff in a small-town speed trap. FYI: every email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $41,484 — that’s per email!
Quick fix: Do not let your database send marketing pieces out in public without first using data validation and appendage tools that provide data enrichment for Marketo, and other MAPs.
8. Bad Decisions
You know who makes bad decisions? Well-meaning people who unfortunately have drawn the wrong conclusions from bad data. It’s impossible to track trends, identify ideal customers and reap the benefits from personalized marketing pieces when a third of your database is missing information or contains misinformation. That’s why it’s imperative that you connect your databases and centralize information access company-wide. It’s the easiest way to ensure you’ve got all the information you need in one place, so that you’re able to keep it clean, enriched and decision-ready. Of course, making decisions quickly is often the difference between winning a sale and coming in second, and everyone knows second place is first loser. If you want to increase the speed of your responses to challenges and opportunities, a data dashboard can help you see insights faster, share information with fellow decision-makers, and pull the trigger on great opportunities before your competition does.
Quick fix: Integrate a data management solution, like Command, into your current marketing automation platform and gain instant access to data insights that are as actionable as they are accurate.