The Importance of Accurate Data in Marketing Strategies

According to a survey by IFP, 96% of marketers are concerned about data accuracy. Almost a third (32%) of the respondents claim that their data infrastructure is fair or poor. What do these findings say about the use of data in marketing strategies?

To put it into starker terms, Auren Hoffman of SafeGraph says that most marketing data is 10% to 20% accurate.

Given these alarming numbers, data quality remains a huge concern for marketers. Data collection is just one part of the equation. Unless it undergoes data preparation and data quality efforts, most of it is useless. It’s no wonder that 67% of Chief Marketing Officers feel they are overwhelmed with data. What matters more is that all this data is prepared, matched, and cleaned for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Today, we’ll look at why most marketing data collected and consolidated by companies is inaccurate, how it impacts your marketing strategy, and how data quality tools like WinPure can help you clean data for optimal results.

Let us begin.

Why is most marketing data inaccurate?

For most businesses, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is central to how they manage their customers. 

Marketers use CRMs to manage interactions and relationships with their present and potential customers. It does everything from organizing and centralizing customer data, tracking interactions, lead management, and sales opportunities across multiple channels like email, phone calls, and even social media.

However, since it is used by many professionals working across various departments and channels, it can pile up with erroneous, missing, or incomplete data. Subsequently, marketers end up spending more time and effort to manually fix the data or relying on IT to do the fixes.

Here are some of the main reasons why data accuracy remains a huge challenge for marketing companies:

Manual Data Entry Errors: Human mistakes during data input, such as typos or misspellings, can lead to inaccuracies and inconsistencies.

Example: A sales representative accidentally enters a customer’s phone number incorrectly, resulting in failed outreach attempts.

Lack of Standardization: The absence of standardized formats and conventions for data entry can result in disparate data representations.

Example: Different employees enter the same type of data (e.g., lead source) using various abbreviations or formats, making it challenging to analyze or compare.

Duplicate Records: Failure to detect and merge duplicate entries can lead to redundancy and confusion.

Example: Two marketing team members create separate records for the same customer, resulting in duplicate entries with conflicting information i.e. Ham Cole, Hamm Cole.

Outdated Information: Inadequate updating and maintenance processes can result in reliance on obsolete data.

Example: A customer’s contact information changes, but the CRM system isn’t updated, leading to failed communications and missed opportunities.

Insufficient Data Validation: Inadequate validation checks during data entry can allow for the inclusion of incorrect or incomplete information.

Example: A new lead is added to the CRM without validating the email address, resulting in a bounce-back when sending marketing emails.

Poor Integration: Integrating data from disparate sources often results in data integration challenges, including data mapping errors, schema mismatches, and data transformation issues. Without robust quality control measures in place, businesses risk introducing inaccuracies and discrepancies into their datasets.

Example: Data imported from a third-party application into the CRM doesn’t align correctly with existing fields, causing data mapping issues.

Data Migration Issues: Errors or loss of data during the migration process from legacy systems to the CRM platform can compromise data quality.

Example: During migration, historical sales data is transferred incompletely, resulting in incomplete customer profiles and inaccurate reporting.

Next, we will look at how much of an effect data accuracy has on your marketing campaigns.

The impact of data accuracy on marketing campaigns

Gone are the days of relying solely on intuition and guesswork; today’s leading marketers are embracing a data-driven approach that leverages the power of information to drive results.

There’s plenty of good reasons why data remains central to marketing campaigns:

It impacts decision-making

PWC surveyed more than 1,000 senior executives who believe that highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making compared to those who rely less on data.

How? Here are a few reasons:

• Targeting Precision: Marketers can identify and target the most relevant audience segments based on demographics, behaviors, preferences, and other criteria. This precision enhances campaign effectiveness by ensuring messages reach the right people.
• Personalization Effectiveness: Personalized marketing efforts tailored to individual preferences and needs have higher engagement rates and conversion rates compared to generic, one-size-fits-all approaches.
• Resource Optimization: With accurate data, marketers can allocate resources more efficiently by focusing on channels, messages, and strategies that resonate most with the target audience. This optimization leads to a better return on investment (ROI) for marketing spend.
• Campaign Performance Measurement: You get reliable insights into campaign performance metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. These insights enable marketers to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns accurately and make data-driven adjustments as needed.
• Predictive Analytics: Accurate historical data serves as a foundation for predictive analytics models, allowing marketers to forecast future trends, customer behaviors, and campaign outcomes. These predictions inform strategic decisions and enable proactive campaign optimization.
• Brand Reputation Management: Inaccurate data can lead to misdirected or irrelevant marketing messages, causing frustration and annoyance among recipients. This can damage brand reputation and erode customer trust. Accurate data ensures that marketing communications are relevant and well-received, enhancing brand perception.

It aids in customer experience and personalization

Cameron Turner, VP of data science for Kin+Carta says that:

“Adaptive experiences tailored to an individual are no longer a novelty, but rather a necessity.”

Further cementing this statement, Future Consumer Index 12 says that 60% of consumers are willing to share data in exchange for a personalized customer experience online.

Here are some reasons why clean data can help in delivering an enhanced customer experience:

• Enhanced Relevance: Accurate data allows marketers to personalize messages and offers based on customer preferences, behaviors, and past interactions. By delivering relevant content tailored to individual interests, marketers can enhance the overall customer experience and increase engagement.
• Improved Targeting: Accurate data enables precise audience segmentation, allowing marketers to target specific customer segments with relevant and timely messages. This targeted approach increases the likelihood of resonating with customers and driving desired actions, leading to a more positive customer experience.
• Consistency Across Channels: Accurate data ensures consistency in customer information across various marketing channels and touchpoints. This consistency enables seamless cross-channel communication and personalized experiences, fostering a cohesive and positive customer journey.
• Trust and Credibility: Inaccurate or outdated data can lead to mistakes, such as sending irrelevant or incorrect information to customers. This can damage trust and credibility, leading to a negative customer experience. Accurate data builds trust by demonstrating that the company values customer information and uses it responsibly to personalize interactions.
• Reduced Friction: Personalization based on accurate data streamlines the customer journey by eliminating irrelevant or repetitive messaging. This reduces friction in the customer experience, making interactions more efficient and enjoyable for customers.
• Anticipation of Needs: Accurate data allows marketers to anticipate customer needs and preferences based on historical behavior and interactions. By proactively addressing customer needs, marketers can create personalized experiences that exceed expectations and foster customer loyalty.

Aron Ezra of Plan A Technologies says AI-driven data analysis falls short if you don’t have reliable data in the first place. Asking AI to come up with a personalized marketing strategy for your customers is as helpful as asking generative tools like AI to create a picture of a human being, where 9/10 times it can’t even draw a human hand right.

It has a bearing on ROI and Business Performance

Building better connections with your audience is one thing. Doing it at a scale can result in massive monetary and operating benefits:

• Reduced Costs: With minimal data errors and inefficiencies, your company can enjoy reduced costs while keeping incorrect shipments, failed marketing efforts, customer churn, and rework at bay.
• Optimized Operations: Accurate data provides insights into operational performance, enabling businesses to identify areas for improvement, streamline processes, and optimize efficiency.
• Competitive Advantage: Businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their market, customers, and competitors, empowering them to stay ahead of industry trends and outperform competitors.
• Enhanced Collaboration: There is more collaboration and alignment across departments, as all stakeholders have access to reliable information for decision-making and planning.
• Improved Scalability: Accurate data lays a solid foundation for scalability, enabling businesses to grow efficiently without being hindered by data-related challenges or inaccuracies.

How WinPure can empower your marketing efforts with clean data

Given the myriad of data challenges that marketers face in formulating their marketing strategy, investing in a data quality tool is a must. WinPure is one such tool in your arsenal

Here are three things WinPure can help you do to ensure that your data gets results for you:

Perform a data quality audit

Your marketing strategy needs a plan. With dirty data, it can be impossible to plan where you want to go. The first thing you need to do is perform a data quality audit to know where you stand.

To do this, you need to clean and match data from various entry points across all systems across the marketing, sales and customer service departments. 

A no-code data quality tool like WinPure makes it easy to do data audits. It can also inspect the present state of your data and score it based on accuracy, consistency, and relevancy.

Centralize all marketing data with data integration

Marketing departments rely on multiple data sources to collect and collate data, a process that’s exhausting, confusing and a massive time sink. Such methods of manual data integration are also prone to human errors.

To make data integration simple, WinPure supports multiple CRMs, database types, and data sources to bring all your data in one place. You can get lean, consolidated data sets with automated data integration.

No more wrong addresses with Global Address Parsing feature

Is it possible to clean all customer address entries, while following the correct format and standards? WinPure actually makes this process seamless and easy with its global address parsing feature.

What does it do? It takes your messy address entries, looks for any abbreviations and conventions, and intelligently breaks them into little chunks of data that can be standardized across the board. And the best part? It works for all countries by detecting which country an address belongs to.

Say goodbye to returned mail and deliveries.

To Conclude – Leverage WinPure No-Code Data Quality Tool for Marketing

One of the easiest and most significant things you can do for your data organization efforts is to invest in a data quality tool that delivers clean and enriched data. These tools perform various functions apart from identifying data inconsistencies and cleaning up duplicates and errors in your database. It ensures that your marketing data is always campaign-ready. 

For marketing departments, it is important that data quality tools are not complicated to use. A no-code software like WinPure prioritizes ease of use while making sure that your data is clean and accurate so that your business can focus on getting the results you want.

It is time to make use of accurate data in marketing strategies to jumpstart your business.

Try it out today.

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