How important is data-quality management in marketing? If you care about effective campaigns, the answer is very.
Incorrect marketing data is more than annoying or inconvenient. It can cost a company money. Some may question the need for strict data-quality management when engaging in digital marketing as opposed to direct mail. After all, it doesn’t cost money to send an email to the wrong address, right?
However, this notion is misguided. Bad marketing data begets bad marketing results by diluting the effects of properly targeted campaigns and possibly magnifying the outcomes of less-effective marketing efforts. Bad data hides what’s really going on from the people who need to know it most.
Content marketing depends on data quality
The great thing about good quality marketing data is that it makes it easy to trust the measured results. If you have confidence in the data, then you can accurately judge campaign effectiveness based on the applicable metrics. Marketers can have faith in results from analytical systems and other types of reporting, and they can adjust campaigns for better targeting, a better pitch, or a more enticing offer.
Bad data is even worse when engaging in predictive analysis
World-class organizations engage in predictive analysis as a matter of course. As one might imagine, inaccurate data in this use case is worse than bad. It’s catastrophic for the process. You might as well try to fly a passenger jet in a simulator training exercise to land at LAX with the coordinates for JFK. It is not going to happen.
Those highly effective personalized campaigns? They depend on high-quality data
It’s happened to everyone. Say you’re a single 37-year-old male looking up the latest box scores on MLB.com, but your vital research on the NL East standings is interrupted by ads for children’s chewable vitamins. You don’t have kids and aren’t planning to, so if that media buy was priced per impression, that wrong targeting data is now costing the advertiser real money.
Up-to-date and accurate data is crucial for digital campaigns, particularly if they’re highly personalized. Companies can’t target a consumer when their tracking information is wrong or just out of date. When one works with highly accurate data sources, one gets better targeting, and increased ROI inevitably follows.
Accurate data begins with your mailing list
We all like big numbers. It sounds much better to say, We have a customer mailing list of over 40,000 contacts than admitting that you only have 10,000. However, of those 40K contacts, how many are still, valid, engaged, and actively consuming your content?
Regular maintenance of a mailing list is a perfect example of what clean data can do. If emails to a list with 150K contacts yield open rates of 1.3% and a click-through of .03%, there is a problem. One’s thoughts would automatically go to That was a bad email.
However, if the list is 25% active contacts and 75% old and inactive emails, there is no real way to have an idea of how the email creative itself fared. The list is a prime example of bad data bloated, stale, outdated, and ultimately misleading.
(For the record, a good average email open rate is 15%-25%, and a good average click-through rate is about 2.5%) via Campaign Monitor.)
Work with the best, most accurate marketing data available: BDEX
There is an alternative to becoming a data quality-control expert and wading through a sea of endless data points, looking for the bad apples. Trust BDEX to provide you with marketing data for almost 500 different industries that is vigilantly maintained to ensure the quality and accuracy of a required data set. Our information has undergone the most demanding data hygiene processes that validate, update, and standardize names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.
So, when a marketing effort targets a specific location, interest, and demographic, and that painstakingly devised piece of communication finds its way to the intended audience, members of that group will soon become customers. BDEX can make sure your aim is true, and your marketing message finds its target. It’s what makes human connectivity happen.
BDEX endows your marketing with the power and depth of human connectivity. Call 917-410-6616 or contact us to learn how marketing solutions from BDEX can help you deliver the right message to the proper audience.
