Most businesses today understand that data is important. However, many don’t understand just how valuable it can be in helping a business unlock or accelerate growth. As a result they fail to invest properly in maintaining it.
I can recall a chat I had with a Database Marketing Manager a few years ago. She was upset as the CEO was refusing to sign off the budget she’d requested to cleanse their data. The database was a substantial size (c. 500K records), so the costs were in the tens of thousands. He’d asked her to provide greater justification for the expenditure which he saw as unnecessary.
This CEO didn’t understand two key things:
1) Any database is an asset and potentially one of the most valuable any company has
2) Data is a ‘living’ entity which needs managing and maintaining
Myself and my Head of Data proved the value of the database to him in two ways.
Firstly, we identified the total annual revenue and profit directly attributable to database-related campaigns in the previous 12 months. These numbers were staggering (even ignoring the many other benefits the database provided).
Secondly, we valued the wasted comms from mailing dirty data – a figure far in excess of the budget being sought for the cleanse.
The argument was quickly won. The surprise was it was needed at all.
If you’re not convinced about the value of your database, here are just a few of the benefits it can bring to growth marketers:
Better insight
Defining your KPIs, understanding your base line performance and then measuring against them on-going is vital if you’re to drive growth. Interrogate your data in the right way and it’ll give you all the answers you need!
More effective acquisition campaigns
Looking at the behaviours of your existing customer base (particularly your best customers) will give you a tight target audience profile – improving the performance of your acquisition campaigns.
More efficient use of your customer marketing budget
You can easily optimise the ROI from your customer marketing programmes by understanding the relative performance of the different segments in your database. It’ll ensure you spend the right amount of money on each group to stimulate a sale.
An optimised marketing mix
All (well nearly all!) marketing teams will analyse the responses and sales generated by individual marketing channels on a campaign-by-campaign basis. But that doesn’t give you the full story. Comparing source information with purchasing behaviour over time will tell you whether a channel delivers the right type of customers who continue to buy time and time again.
Better conversion rates
The chance of converting a customer directly from an ad can be small. But what they will do is give you a group of hand-raisers. By putting leads through a well-considered, automated nurture programme you can convert more of these into sales – with limited resource investment.
Data can tell you so much about a business, how it’s performing and how that performance can ultimately be improved. That’s the reason data analysis remains one of the most important tasks we undertake for clients - fuelling many of the recommendations we make to drive business growth.
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