This Christmas, Better Data = Better Marketing

reindeer At Christmas time retailers will find they have an absolute deluge of customer data coming in. Names, email addresses, postal codes, product preferences, purchase and card details, real-time behavioral insights, delivery preferences – that’s a lot of stuff to store and process. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up in a festive jumble with money being wasted all over the shop at a time of year when profit really counts.

A merry little Christmas?

What kind of animal does pet store customer John Smith own? If the answer is six cats, he won’t be impressed with his ‘valued customer’ festive gift of holly shaped dog treats. Can you tell if the dozen or so ‘James Kelly’ entries you have in your database are the same person? If not, you might end up failing to send your XMAS19 10% discount code to an interested customer, or sending six different codes to someone who will become increasingly frustrated by the repetition (and potentially block all future communications). And if that urgent gift gets sent to the wrong house due to a data entry error, you’ll be getting a lump of coal in your stocking for sure!

Poor quality data that contains numerous errors can really take the sparkle off your seasonal marketing campaign. Worse still, inaccurate names, addresses and contact details, along with duplicate records and decayed information, can distort your view of the customer.

Doesn’t really feel like Christmas at all

baubles This will severely undermine any attempts at personalization and speaking to your customers as individuals, not to mention result in them being segmented and targeted inappropriately. Think Christmas cards being sent out with the right first initial but wrong first name, someone who has booked a beach holiday every winter for the last decade being targeted with ski resort promotions, and details of how to spend loyalty card points on gifts in your Portland, OR flagship store being sent to customers in Portland, ME.

At best, a lot of your precious Q4 budget will be wasted and your customer will shake their heads at your lack of insight into who they are and what they’re eager to buy at this time of year. At worst, they will take all their Christmas shopping elsewhere and encourage everyone they speak to at the work do to follow their example.

May all your troubles soon be gone

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) with data cleansing capabilities can help, as not only will it consolidate every scrap of data you hold about each customer in one place, making it easier to understand that customer’s priorities and motivations when planning themed campaigns, but ensure that any records you hold are complete, high quality and trustworthy enough to base decisions (or stake your Christmas bonus) on.

Cleansing means:

Deleting duplicate entries
Removing incomplete records or updating them with the help of third party data
Identifying lapsed or lost customers (and deleting the latter)
Making sure communication preferences are clear
Making sure you keep only correct, current information (knowing Tom Hammond lived in Houston last year won’t help you get a themed discount leaflet through his door in Austin this year)

A Single Customer View provides an organization with an accurate, fully formed record of their customers and prospects, so that trustworthy data will form the foundation of your 1-to-1 marketing efforts. It’s like suddenly being given unlimited access to Santa’s list, just as you’re starting your hunt for perfect gifts for the whole family – almost too easy!

If you know that Jenny Clement lives in Baltimore and buys a gift wrapped bottle of Dolce and Gabbana perfume from your online cosmetics store in January each year, why wouldn’t you send her a personalized invitation for her and a friend to get a 30% off perfumes at the New Year’s launch of your new Baltimore store?

Faithful friends who are dear to us, gather near to us once more

The benefits of clean data are plentiful and include:

Being sure your messages to customers will get through
Avoiding wasting budget on inappropriate, repeated or misdirected messages
The chance to make your customers feel ‘known’ and understood
The opportunity to drive conversions and encourage higher spending through suitable product information and offers
Clearer and simpler analysis and evaluation of campaign impact
Better business intelligence to base future decisions on

Once you’re confident all the details you hold on each customer are complete and correct, you’ll be able to make decisions with confidence and throw the bulk of your festive budget into wooing the customers most likely to want to shop for exactly what you’re selling this Christmas.

A CDP, coupled with an analytics and orchestration engine, will help you to ask the right questions and make the right campaign decisions to achieve:

Better segmentation of your customer base: Clustering groups through any combination of demographic, geographic, transactional and behavioral data will allow you to target the right customers with yuletide products and services aligned to their personal needs and wants.

This will lead to higher conversion rates from your holiday campaign, encourage retention and long term revenue from those who bought last year, and add useful additional data to help you plan and target an even more effective campaign for next year.

More personalized campaigns: Using a correct name will get your promotion off on the right foot, while linking the right customer to the correct transactional history allows for relevant gift recommendation messages and targeted advertising of the products they tend to snap up.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

In other words, good data will help you book a place on your clients’ nice list by helping you, through clear insights and well-judged decisions, to deliver a customer experience as rosy as Rudolph’s nose. Bad data, on the other hand, will get you on the naughty list with both your employees, who will struggle to meet their targets and stay within budget due to flawed, misleading data, and your customers, who will find your promotions more annoying and irrelevant than “Jingle Bells” in June.

It’s therefore important to have a suitable CDP or other method of cleansing, deduplicating and unifying your data that will continuously optimize your data all year round – not just for Christmas.