4 Tips To Help Marketers Commit To Data Quality

With 2015 upon us, it’s time to prioritze your top initiatives for the New Year.  It’s also a great time to reflect on what went well over the last 12 months and what initiatives didn’t go as planned.

Did you spend the last year obsessing over your content and design, running tests to optimize your call to action, or did you spend huge amounts of time planning and building multi-touch campaigns? I’m thinking a lot of people are nodding their heads. But let me ask you this, do you think you put the same amount of effort into improving the quality of your data?

If your marketing goals for the new year include increasing engagement or conversion, and driving more revenue, you will definitely need to put a greater focus on your data. 

As you plan for 2015, think about how data plays a role in your initiatives.

• Can you easily target and segment contacts for campaigns?
• Do you know what basic information you need to capture from new contacts?
• How well are you able to score your leads?
• Do you have processes in place to handle the data coming to you from various sources?

Data quality is the foundation of your marketing efforts.  While poor data quality can make it difficult to adopt more advanced techniques, it can also hamper basic marketing functions.   Predictive lead scoring or account based marketing may be the all the rage right now, but you need to have clean data to successfully support these efforts. 

If you are just getting started on this journey, here are some great tips to help you on your way: 

1. Assign a data owner or owners. Having someone responsible for data quality in your organization will help ensure success.  This person will be leading the charge to identify issues, implement changes and maintain the ongoing heath of your data.

2. Conduct a data audit of your systems. How complete are your contact records? Do you have standardized values in place for key fields such as, industry, job function/level, employee size? Do you have required fields for your forms?

3. Review your data upload processes. Be sure to have these processes well documented, leverage an upload template complete with standardized values, and communicate these processes to your stakeholders.

4. Create a data maintenance plan. Which reports and processes will you run on a weekly/monthly/quarterly basis to ensure your data is clean and standardized – and stays that way?

As you finalize your initiatives for 2015, take a look at the health of your data and determine if it is ready to support all of the great projects you have planned.

If you are just getting started with data quality, or struggling with bad, old or incomplete data, request to have the Data Quality Facilitated Discussion with a marketing advisor today!  Check out our full menu of Facilitated Discussions that are available at no additional cost to Oracle Marketing Cloud Customers.

Also check out our Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management for more helpful information and tips.