I love the annual planning process. Does anyone other than me ever say that? I love to outline initiatives that I want to tackle in the year to come. It’s a great time to assess what went well in the current / previous year and brainstorm what you can take on in the year to come. It’s a time to strategize and build out plans to take on the next year with force.
Part of the planning process, at least for me, consists of evaluating the tasks that have yet to be completed and set aside time to finish each task in the final months of the year. You could compare this to finishing the race strong with an all-out sprint.
As I talk to customers about their big initiatives, I’ve noticed two tasks come up recently that are on a lot of marketers to-do list for the final push of 2015. While you could certainly call them by other names, I’ll call these two tasks “clean” and “complete”. Both of these tasks are centered on getting your database in order for success in the year to come.
Clean Your Data
This past week, I spoke with a marketer and asked her about the quality of their database. A moment of blank staring was quickly followed by a genuine, long laugh. It seems that every marketer finds their data to be inaccurate and, at the end of the day, unreliable. Among other issues, this leaves money on the table for every business as campaign success rates suffer when your message doesn’t make it to a prospect. It also ruins your reputation when the customer experience is affected by inaccurate data. As she explained to me, when her emails bounce and her urgent messages never make it to her customers, each customer is left with a poor perception of their organization.
Complete Your Data
Not only is it important to clean up the quality of your data, but also, it’s important to fill those blanks in your database. This is another big issue that I see marketers taking on recently. This problem goes beyond filling in a missing phone number or mailing addresses. Completing your database includes pulling in data that you simply don’t want to ask your customers to provide to you. This data is important to your campaign success as it allows you to more accurately segment, target and personalize the experience for every prospect and customer. Filling in this type of data from a third party source is the only option. Sure, you could ask that customer that you’ve had for five years what industry they are in, but won’t that leave them with the thought of, “Shouldn’t you already know that?”
According to a recent study by Demand Gen Reports, “Without a clean and complete database, organizations are limiting their ability to target and engage their prospective audience at each stage of the buying cycle.” So, as a to-do item for the end of your business year, evaluate the state of your current database. Schedule a data test with one of our Data as a Service reps so that you can set yourself up for success for 2016 and beyond.
If you would like to read the full Demand Gen Report on this same topic, download it here today.
The post Two Big Initiatives to Finish 2015 Strong appeared first on The Informatica Blog - Perspectives for the Data Ready Enterprise.