Data Driven Marketing

The Managing Director of Royal Mail's Data Services shares his insights into the true cost of poor-quality customer data.

As more marketers work to improve ROI and address new data regulations, the true costs of poor-quality customer data are about to become clear New research into the use and management of customer data from Royal Mail Data Services reveals that UK organisations estimate poor-quality customer data is costing them an average of 6% of their annual revenues. So how can marketers and data experts finally clean up their customer data to improve overall operational efficiency and campaign effectiveness and comply with data protection regulations?

Marketers face a data dilemma

Today’s marketers rely on good-quality contact data above all else to ensure the success of a campaign’s performance. Yet despite reporting data quality as having the biggest impact on campaign response and conversion rates,…

Crawl, walk, run: three steps to establishing an effective DMP

As digital marketers we're all too aware of the importance of data. For example, the typical fortune 1000 company that sees a 10% increase in data accessibility generates $65 million in additional revenue, whilst bad or poor quality data costs organisations as much as 10-20% in revenue. Although Big Data is no longer a new area of interest for marketers, the constant change in trends and focus mean that we must always stay up to date, if not one step ahead, of the trends to ensure we hold a competitive advantage. Just consider the sheer complexity of data-related terms: I recently attended a data-driven marketing event run by the Omnicom Group which gave me the opportunity to look at some of the insights and trends from those working at the…

Dirty data leads to costly mistakes. Here's how to prevent them

A co-worker once told me the sort of horror story that causes marketers to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. In a previous position at a large technology company, he and his team generated numerous leads through conferences and trade shows. The field marketing managers would send the leads to their marketing operations team via CSV files, and the operations team would use the information to follow up with these leads. The data came in varied formats and was not always clean or easily segmented. In one unfortunate case, the marketing operations team mistakenly uploaded a file containing 500 software industry leads under the service provider category in their system. The leads were routed into the service provider channel, and all 500 of them received a service provider newsletter rather than a software email. Needless to…

Understand your marketing ROI and use the data to inform your data-driven marketing strategy

While the attraction of data-driven marketing isn’t in doubt, the challenge confronting businesses can be daunting. According to the Q1 2014 Gleanster Research customer experience survey, about eight out of ten senior marketers believe their organisation could be doing a better job of using customer data to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies. But with data-driven marketing involving so many working parts, the end goal can appear unobtainable. To create a data driven strategy, you first need to know how to establish an effective way to measure marketing ROI.

Data-driven measurement

The advent of data-driven marketing should ensure that organisations can not only identify the strategies and campaigns that are most likely to be successful, but also secure buy-in and investment for marketers by demonstrating the potential ROI of impending campaigns. Put simply, if a marketing department is truly data-driven, the measurement of…

Wearable technology trends and the future of digital selling

Until what seems like very recently, wearable technology has remained on the fringes of consumer consciousness, with most people unsure what to make of it. 'What’s the point in moving the user interface two inches from my pocket to my wrist?' people rightly ask. 'But I’m terrible at multitasking, those glasses will just be another distraction…' Although wearables still have yet to gain widespread popularity, interest is stirring and 2015 may just be the year it turns a corner. According to a recent report from Juniper Research, wearable advertising spend is estimated to reach just $1.5 million this year, but by 2019 is expected to hit a slightly more impressive $68.7 million. That’s a huge new market, and one that online marketers would do well to embrace.

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Developing skills needed for data-driven marketers who can understand and apply metrics and analytics

Becoming a data-driven organisation doesn’t just rely on the right technology, structure and processes. The human element is essential, and without the right skills, qualities and roles, any effort to be successful at data-driven marketing is destined to struggle.

The kinds of skills that support a data-driven philosophy are rich and varied

'The team needs to be technically savvy,' says Jim Sterne, Founder of the Digital Analytics Association. "They do not need to be technologists, but they need to understand how the Internet functions at the bits-and-bytes level, so they can make the most of it at the human level. The team needs to understand how data is gathered and where it may have weaknesses so they can make informed decisions about which numbers to trust in which…

Barriers to adoption of Marketing Automation and how overcome them

In research TFM&A (2014) identified that there were 5 main benefits to marketing automation: personalisation, campaign management, triggered emails, control and insight.   But with such clear benefits why are more organisations not adopting the tools that can lead to greater business success? In this blog I’ll be explaining the key barriers to adoption of marketing automation and give an action plan for marketers who want to persuade their organisations to adopt an automated approach.

Who are the non-adopters?

The barriers to adoption of marketing automation vary greatly depending on the type of company, their needs and their previous investments. In  research carried out by CommsBox we identified 4 key types of non-adopter. Although by no means exclusive, they give an in-depth insight into the difficulties that companies face when making major investments in change. You might recognise elements of your own organisation here: Trailing…

Customers have similar traits but are not all alike and should not be spoken to with a single message in the same manner and tone. This was initially looked at in an earlier article ‘Talk to your customers or talk to your customer?’, but once the need to communicate with and not at all your customers is understood, providing different messages/offer/content using surface level details is a tempting approach, for example splitting the message by gender and/or age group.

This approach assumes that the surface level details represent the best groups of customers which will not always be the case. Looking at the sand in the first image at first glance all the grains seems to be identical with some obvious differences becoming apparent when a more detailed…

How to increase communications relevance through more personalised, contextual messages based on customer insight

Data is the key to understanding your customers and delivering new insights, but data in itself is just a series of 1s and 0s until you can bring meaning and interpretation.

Knowing and understanding your data is the first step in delivering relevant communications and customer value, as you turn raw data into information and then actionable insight. Starting this journey however can be a difficult step as highlighted in the 2013 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey which stated:

‘Nearly 50 percent of marketers agree that data is the most underutilised asset in their organisation, with less than 10 percent saying they currently use what data they have in a systematic way’

Where to start?

There are several ways to data discovery and data…

How Big Data enables the relationship between data types to be explored

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Velocity component of Big Data provides greater understanding of your customers, improving marketing performance. In this post, I will explore the third of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Variety on Marketing Variety covers the multiple types of data that are now available from the established structured data of tables and columns, with defined elements and values, to the many unstructured free format types of data. In recent years the amount of unstructured data and machine generated data is increasing at an exponential rate, being the major proportion (>80%) of the vast volumes of data now in existence. So what does this…