Managing Multi-channel Marketing Data . . .

10 Ways to Make Marketing Data Work for You, Not Against You

Multichannel marketing requires careful data management in order to prevent channel conflict and nuture leads through the sales pipeline to a profitable sale. Planning your data capture in advance and developing a process for harvesting, cleaning, consolidating, classifying, and communicating with responders is the key to a successful, longterm multichannel marketing strategy.

If you want your marketing data to work for you, not against you, make sure your multi-channel marketing plans include these 10 data management tasks:

1. Plan an efficient Data Capture Strategy - Are you using unique telephone extensions and landing pages to track responses? Do you bar-code your business reply cards and package insert offers so you can easily track responders? Are your web forms short and easy to complete? Do you use auto completion to speed data entry and improve accuracy? Can RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) do your data entry for you?
2. Build both active and passive data capture mechanisms into your marketing campaigns - active data capture methods include web forms, 800 numbers, Business Reply Cards and other methods where the respondents are actively aware that they are providing information to you. Passive methods are setting cookies on your website, electronically tracking click-through responses from email campaigns with unique landing pages, matching IP addresses to a geo-locator database to find the city and country of each of web visitors, and determining product interest by browser activity rather than directly questioning your prospects. Take advantage of every touch point with your prospect to learn more about them and make future messages more relevant and meaningful.
3. Harvest data from all marketing channels and enter once into your marketing database - Whether your prospect enters the information on a web form, or a data entry clerk inputs data from a business reply card, make sure you plan an electronic transfer path to your main marketing database. Information won't have to be reentered and will be in a format that is compatible with data from other channels.
4. Clean and standardize data from all channels - Standardize all name and address data by validating with a US Postal Service certified address verification program, even if you don't plan to use direct mail as a marketing channel. The process is very inexpensive and makes it far easier to match and consolidate records.
5. Consolidate marketing data by eliminating bogus data and merge/purging duplicate entries - by separating the bogus contacts from real prospects, you lend credibility to your entire campaign, motivate your sales force with higher quality leads, and save the cost and effort of trying to contact the bad leads in the future.
6. Match new contact information to customer file and append customer number, if matched - this is perhaps one of the most important steps and sadly, one of the most overlooked steps in multichannel marketing. Your marketing campaign may not always yield enough information for an exact match, but even parsing an email address to harvest a company name can often identify respondents from key account companies so you can direct them to the appropriate sales contact.
7. Append demographics from external database to enhance contact information - You don't have to ask the size of the company on your web form. You can match the company name to a compiled business database and append size of business, industry type, number of employees and other important lead-qualifying information. When marketing to consumers you can append age, income, presence of children, homeownership, etc.
8. Append behavioral and technical data from web analytics data feeds - your web analytics data can tell you if your prospect was using a broadband or dial-up connection, what site they were browsing before reaching your site, which pages they viewed, how much time they spent on each page, whether they were a first time or return visitor and many other facts that can help you segment your market and target future messages.
9. Classify marketing data into segments or personas - use business intelligence and data mining tools to help you sort out the vast quantities of marketing data you've collected and group them into segments or personas that have similar wants and needs for your products.
10. Target each segment or persona with a relevant sequence of marketing events that will lead to a sale - share the results of your hard-earned data management process with your creative team and product development team so they can create more relevant messages and products for each segment.

If doing all of these data management tasks seems like an overwhelming job, remember that you are building an infrastructure for long-term success. You will see higher conversion rates, a more motivated and productive sales force, and a dramatic improvement in marketing productivity if you manage your marketing data skillfully.