With budgets shrinking across the board, companies and marketing managers need to increase their profitability and ensure financial efficiencies. But, deciding where best to invest your time and money to achieve the biggest bang for your buck can be confusing and often seems to distract marketers from getting the basics right.
A key consideration in today’s cluttered and technology-led environment is to have a proficient data management strategy. However many companies, especially those with loyalty programs, have a wealth of data that isn’t often being utilised to its greatest potential.
The holy-grail for marketers is to have a single customer view (SCV) of each product and interaction, but keeping customers’ basic information in good order is often overlooked. We often find businesses are working with out-dated customer lists and old information saved in a variety of formats. This obviously limits the benefit customer data can bring to your company, particularly as your existing customers are potentially the greatest source of future business.
A systematic update of your customer database provides a huge opportunity for growth and budget efficiencies. Simply put, this involves a thorough clean-up and reduces customer duplication, as well as ensuring you have up-to-date contact details. Additionally, your customer database should be maintained in real time on a 24/7 basis rather than on a project basis. Benefits include a reduction in duplicated or wrongly-addressed mail, as well as cross-channel communications. For example, you may be able to use an SMS campaign to attract people to your Facebook page and drive further consumer interest and engagement.
The main purpose of an efficient data strategy is to be in control of your customer information. Given the obvious truth of this statement, one might forget that most companies aren’t keeping their customers’ basic information in one location. Instead, different databases are often held in a variety of places including the shared drives of your advertising and digital agency or, in the worst cases, in someone’s personal folder!
Syncing databases can be complicated and often requires professional help, but a software provider can work out where your gaps are. And, if you choose a local solution, you won’t be lumped with a giant bill for flying in a consultant from overseas.
Companies then need to embrace their own databases as the basis for all customer/supplier communication and turn analytics into action by creating their own media channel. Being in control of your database and customer communication via your own channels is the future of marketing and loyalty management, so make sure your company gets on board.
Lastly, it is important to put measurement strategies in place so you gain valuable insights into how your customers interact with your brand. This means you can tailor future communication and hopefully increase efficiencies over time, as well as maximising brand loyalty and the all-important factor, sales.
In short, the five golden rules of basic data management are:
1. Maintain your customer database
2. Carry out a systematic data update
3. Be in control of your data
4. Turn analytics into action and create your own media channel
5. Manage and measure the outcome
Paul Dolan
Chief Executive Officer
Simplicity CRM Australia