Marketers are facing a huge data issue – with access to deluges of data, it is quality and governance that separates the best marketers from their competition. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that marketers deliver relevant, personalised content to their customers to be heard above the noise.

However, our latest The State of Salesforce Report reveals that nearly four in five (79%) marketers don’t believe they’re offering relevant, personalised data to consumers. The report also finds that 60% of marketers cite poor or inconsistent data quality, or lack of data, as their biggest challenge to producing personalised campaigns, and as a result, leading CMOs are making data quality and access the central focus of their marketing strategy in 2016.

But how can CMOs and marketing professionals improve the quality and access to data?

Integration and collaboration are key

Marketers need to integrate the platforms and applications they use to gain access to more and cleaner data. When integration is successful, campaigns are more personalised and their ROI can be effectively measured.

In order to tackle bad data, CMOs must work with CIOs – only clean, accurate data will allow them to focus on messaging strategy and creative campaigns. By working together, CMOs and CIOs should constrain data input - standardising what users can enter into databases (specifically, eliminating free text fields) to move toward cleaner data. They should also focus on integrating the right data, not the most data. Marketers must pinpoint the desired outcome of a campaign and find the most relevant data sources to support it. Access to too much data is just as cumbersome as access to too little data.

But reducing bad data is only half the battle. The other half is keeping it up-to-date. By working with trusted third-party data sources that consistently update customer information, CMOs can reduce the manual burden on employees and limit errors.

The most innovative companies acknowledge that integration technology forms only part of the analytics solution. For 58% of companies, defining and sharing best practices for analysing customer data is a top priority because it improves employee productivity and makes it easier for them to serve their customers.

Data governance for personalisation

But integration without strong data governance — and specifically, the bad data that can come as a result of it — is marketers’ biggest barrier to success. For companies striving for clean data, taking steps toward establishing a data governance strategy will set the foundation for success.

While there are many approaches to defining best practices for analytics and reporting, marketers must have a process in that includes the following steps:

  1. Identify a data steward and perform a data assessment. Identify issues with the data in order to plan cleansing and enrichment strategies.

  2. Standardise data fields and validate field values. Ensure data fields have consistent definitions and formats across applications and confirm that data falls within defined limits or acceptable values.

  3. Enrich the data. Improve and refine raw data with additional information like DUNS numbers, industry and address information, geographic coordinates, or alternative emails. It’s important to also selectively replicate and synchronise data, by instilling a process that transfers only the most valuable data between applications and systems.

  4. Cleanse data before mastering. Creating a single customer view is always more successful when the data is cleaned first and ensure all data entry errors are trapped.

  5. Repeat. Establish a process that regularly evaluates the effectiveness of all the steps.

Data governance is absolutely vital when it comes to personalisation. In fact, our research found that companies with an effective data governance strategy are nearly three times as likely to offer more personalised marketing messages. For marketers, data is the customer – clean, accessible and high-quality data gives marketers the ability target and engage each customer to maximise loyalty and retention. The companies that invest in taking care of their data will always stay ahead of the competition.

 

By Vera Loftis, Managing Director UK at Bluewolf. 

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