Data Quality: A Survival Guide to Marketing

WHITE PAPER
DATA QUALITY: A SURVIVAL GUIDE
FOR MARKETINGImproving Your Customer Data for Marketing Effectiveness
CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY1 Executive Summary2 T ypical Data Problems in a Direct marketing is about communicating a message to a specific prospect Marketing Campaign or customer. The success of that communication, measured in terms of a 2 Duplicate Account Records qualified lead that generates a sale, depends on accurately identifying the 3 Incomplete Data prospect. Once you've identified the prospect, you need to contact and convince 3 The Wrong Data them your message is worth their time. There is nothing like misspelling 4 H ow Marketing Benefits from Quality Data their name, using the wrong title, mailing to an old address, or mailing multiple 5 But How Do I Find My Data copies to instantly lose credibility. But ensuring data quality can be a significant Quality Problems? challenge if you have 500,000 or a million or 10 million prospect records in 7 A ttacking the Data Quality Problem at your customer relationship management (CRM) system and you are trying to the Source target the right prospect. The challenge becomes matching the target audience 9 Transactional Updates 10 Operational Feeds of your upcoming marketing campaign to the records in your database. How 10 Purchased Data do you select the correct prospects? Data quality, data integration, and other 11 Legacy Migration functions of enterprise information management (EIM) are crucial to this endeavor. 11 Regular Maintenance 12 Mapping the Opportunities Demographics of the prospects are certainly key to mapping your CRM records to Cleanse to the campaign selection, but have you applied the right demographic codes 14 D ata Quality Functions in a Marketing to the right prospects? In past eras, when mass marketing was in vogue, Environment it was standard practice to just mail out the 10 million marketing flyers and 16 Delivering Data Quality Functionality hope for the best. In those days, marketing budgets were constructed to 16 On-Premise Software 17 Internal Hosting via Web Services support the printing and postage fees of massive mailing campaigns. Not so 17 On-Demand today, where marketing is compelled to be significantly more efficient and 18 Service Bureaus cost-effective at reaching the right customers.19 Tying It All Together 19 About Business Objects Ultimately, even with the finest marketing organizations, the success of marketing comes down to the data. Surrounding the data and storage application are people, processes, standards, and technologies used to manage that data. This white paper from Business Objects, an SAP company, focuses on these concepts as they pertain to marketing, and particularly as they are supported by data quality functions inside of the broader EIM framework.
Author: Frank Dravis, Six Factors ConsultingTYPICAL DATA PROBLEMS IN A
MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Perhaps you recognize or have suffered at the hands of some of these problems. We list and discuss them briefly here to establish a common understanding of what we face. One thing that becomes apparent is data quality problems exacerbate each other. For example, if you have duplicate records, some of the duplicates will not be reconciled if crucial data elements such as addresses are incorrect or not standardized.
DUPLICATE ACCOUNT RECORDSWhich record do you choose? I have often seen an 8:1 duplication ratio between customer records. That is, for every one Ford Motor customer record that you think is the master, you could have seven more records in the same file, as well as others across your enterprise in disparate systems. How does this happen? In many ways-and those of us who capture, create, and store customer data are still inventing new ways. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is certainly one large contributor to duplicate records. I've seen it over and over where IT is saddled with merging two versions of accounts payable, billing, shipping, fulfillment, order entry, and CRM systems, and is either given too little time, has its original scheduled shortened, or lacks adequate resources to merge the systems without creating duplicates. In truth, even the best M&A integration projects still create some duplicate records, but more often overburdened IT shops-in order to make their deadlines-are forced to just merge two systems together and let operations clean up the mess ... [download for more]