Value of a Marketing Database for Sales and Marketing

The world is confusing today. We have DMP’s, CDP’s, CRM’s, SFA’s, etc. All these handles similar but different information. In this article I will refer to a consolidated single view of suspects, prospects, and customers as a Marketing Database.

I am occasionally asked what are the benefits of a Marketing Database. It’s an important question and everyone should have some idea of the value it can provide to a sales and marketing team. In my experience excellent marketing data can unleash tremendous profits for an organization. So, I came up with the following summary outlining what a quality database can and should do for you.

Single Source of Marketing Data: I don’t even have to ask, I already know in many organizations the data required for sales and marketing is spread all over the place in multiple silos. I have seen this in several companies, it’s a common problem. A marketing database will consolidate this data into one warehouse. It will contain your customers, prospects, suspects, users, and the like. It will be your source for marketing and sales campaigns as well as the source for your analytical reporting. This will speed up your go to market by allowing triggered events. If recency in data is king, then automation has to be the queen. Getting campaigns out the door quickly drives big wins.

Clean Data: A major function of the Marketing Database is providing you with clean data. Chances are your data is problematic, full of duplicates, movers, invalid addresses, deceased, or “do not contact” records. You want to be sure this data is cleaned and professional before you use it in a campaign. You also do not want to waste money attempting to contact records that are invalid or duplicate. I have actually seen a sales team double the close rate on a campaign just by receiving clean deduplicated data.

Compliance: Today we need to deal with CCPA, GDPR, CAN-SPAM, Designated Nationals, and USPS rules. Noncompliance with these rules will lead to heavy fines. A Marketing Database will track your critical data, provide a history of contacts, and suppress contacts to assist with compliance to these rules.

Segmentation: Another feature is the scoring and segmentation of your contact data. With the data organized in your Marketing Database you can easily mine it and analyze it to identify your most responsive and/or most profitable leads. They can be ranked best to worst performing. Then you can concentrate your sales and marketing efforts on the best scoring leads, filtering down to the lower levels if you have the time and money.

Contact and Response History: A Marketing Database will give you a complete history of customer communications. Imagine how valuable this history would be to your sales and marketing team. You will have a record of who, when and how often you have talked to each customer or prospect. This will help to insure you will not harass your leads by over contacting them. That leads to do not contact requests being allocated to the SPAM folder or being blocked by the ISP or domain. You don’t want that to happen! It will also show how many times you have talked to everyone in your list. This data is absolutely critical to your campaign reporting.

Automated Campaigns: As I stated if recency is king then automation is queen. The Marketing Database enables you to perform triggered or recurring campaigns. You will be able to automatically trigger campaigns when certain conditions have been met. This can be used for renewal, win-back, retention efforts, cross-sell, and up-sell offers.

Campaign Management Data: All campaigns will be flagged with critical data to facilitate accurate reporting. It will record the campaign types including acquisition, retention, win-back, up-sell and cross-sell. It will record additional data like channel, message, offer, drop date, etc. All this data will be at your fingertips and ready for campaign reporting and follow up.

Campaign Success Reporting: You cannot be an effective marketer without campaign reporting. It’s a must-have because without it you are just guessing. The database will have a complete history of incoming and outgoing contacts including sales. This along with the campaign management data is the foundation required to do campaign effectiveness reporting. You will be able to calculate the ROI and cost per acquisition on all your marketing campaigns. With accurate campaign reporting, you will be able to perform one of the basic tenets of marketing and that is testing. This allows the marketers to refine their strategies. They can adjust the channel, message and/or offers until they get the optimal response. This will maximize your ROI and save money.

Summary: I have personally seen companies turned around just by treating their sales and marketing data as a precious resource and following the basic steps I have outlined here. If you want to grow your business, you need to have a solid grasp of your marketing data along with sound, flexible and evolving marketing strategies. Without a good Marketing Database, you are leaving money on the floor.

If you have any questions about these postings. Please reach out to me. I am happy to help.

Regards,

Scott Matson
Scott.Matson@CRM-Whiz.com
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