How to improve marketing ROI with clean data
Without clean data, marketers will have a hard time generating quality leads.
Marketers know accurate data is tablestakes. It helps organizations make better decisions for their customers and, in turn, increases ROI.
Yet even the most meticulous brands more often than not find errors within their datasets. A study published by Zoominfo found that 94% of businesses suspect their customer data is inaccurate.
“In 2017 we took a look at our data and found that it was good, but ultimately it wasn’t great and we really wanted it to be so,” said Dominic Freschi, Senior Data Administrator, Marketing at accounting and consulting firm Armanino, speaking at MarTech. “When we took that deep dive, we found that there were some things clouding that view. Things like missing data, bad or old data, siloed data over to the side, duplicates spanning across multiple systems.”
Freschi says his organization made the decision to clean up this data so they could fully trust it going forward.
Watch the full presentation from MarTech here (free registration required)
Automating the processes
Cleaning up your data with a process automation platform can make the process more efficient. These systems help marketers aggregate internal, partner, and open data into a central repository.
“We can ultimately push it back into our systems so that we’re getting that cleaned data that we can use from then on,” said Freschi, speaking on his own company’s platform choice. “And it’s all done in one app, so it’s very easy to build on top of what we’ve already done with our data.”
Once you have your automation platform in place, here are the three steps to cleaning your organization’s data:
- Improve data standardization and connectivity: Remove junk values from fields, correct user information, and normalize regional classification.
- Consolidate duplicate data: Determine what types of duplicate data pieces are within your system, merge them, and set automated de-duplication rules. Find out what types of data are missing and include them in the setup.
- Set up process automation: Now that the manual tasks are complete, you can run your automation system, eliminating as many future manual processes as possible.
“Many companies have bought at least one, sometimes even two three or four, different third-party data providers data and many of them struggle with aggregating it and applying it to the right company and the right lead,” said Allen Pogorzelski of Openprise in a separate MarTech session.
He added, “If you clean up your data first, your match rates will be much, much higher and you’ll come across fewer instances where you’ve got a lead in the door being unable to enrich it.”
Marketing automation: A snapshot
What they are. For today’s marketers, automation platforms are often the center of the marketing stack. They aren’t shiny new technologies, but rather dependable stalwarts that marketers can rely upon to help them stand out in a crowded inbox and on the web amidst a deluge of content.
How they’ve changed. To help marketers win the attention battle, marketing automation vendors have expanded from dependence on static email campaigns to offering dynamic content deployment for email, landing pages, mobile and social. They’ve also incorporated features that rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence for functions such as lead scoring, in addition to investing in the user interface and scalability.
Why we care. The growing popularity of account-based marketing has also been a force influencing vendors’ roadmaps, as marketers seek to serve the buying group in a holistic manner — speaking to all of its members and their different priorities. And, ideally, these tools let marketers send buyer information through their tight integrations with CRMs, giving the sales team a leg up when it comes to closing the deal.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
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