With uncertainty about the U.S economy growing, businesses across the country remain focused on maintaining a positive cash flow. One way to impact that is to make sure your marketing campaigns perform well. We sat down with Tony Romero from our Marketing Products team to discuss what small businesses can do to make sure their data is in good shape for campaigns, and a special 3-part Sip and Solve webinar series around B2B marketing. Check out our conversation with Tony.
Watch our interview
What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our conversation.
[Gary Stockton]: Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Experian Business Chat. With uncertainty about the U S economy growing, businesses across the country remain focused on maintaining a positive cash flow. And one way to impact that is to make sure that marketing campaigns are performing well. So we’ve put together a series of three short business chats with our experts about B2B marketing. Today, we’re going to be speaking with Experian’s marketing products manager, Tony Romero, about marketing data. Good morning, Tony.
[Tony Romero]: Good morning.
[Gary Stockton]: So let’s dive in, CRM databases can go stale quickly. And when people change jobs or change roles, this can impact campaign performance. So, keeping tabs on your marketing data is highly recommended. How does poorly managed marketing data impact marketing campaigns?
[Tony Romero]: Yeah, it can really impact negatively, you know, for example, the bad data, it means that you’re not reaching your target audience and you’re wasting money, right? As they’re doing any type of direct mail campaign or any other multi-channel campaign, not reaching the right audience is going to be costly for you. But secondly, it also means that you’re going to potentially reach the wrong audience. And that’s also just as detrimental because you want to be as efficient as possible.
[Gary Stockton]: So why is it important to have clean and robust marketing data?
[Tony Romero]: Yeah. When you think about what clean and robust comprehensive marketing data provides is that first of all, you’re able to identify your true market segment. Who are you trying to reach? Secondly, you want to understand what’s the messages that you want to get across to these people, and you want to make sure that again, you’re reaching the right people in order to deliver that message to them. So by having clean data, you’re able to reach the right audience you’re re and you’re able to communicate that message to them properly.
[Gary Stockton]: So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see businesses make when it comes to data governance?
[Tony Romero]: Yeah, you know, what’s, what I would say is the most important is that data can go stale very quickly as, as you’ve mentioned, Gary. And so it’s very important to make sure that it’s current. Secondly, you could have duplicate data or you could have incorrect data. So data hygiene is seriously critical in order to make sure that you have current data and correct data. And then that way, for sure, you’ll again, get back to deliverability, you’ll be able to reach the right audience. The other thing too, that’s important is that when you’re thinking about segmenting an audience and you want to be able to filter out who’s in the right audience, who’s not in the right audience, again, having proper data, make sure that you’re truly calling the true target audience for, for your campaign.
[Gary Stockton]: So cleaning a marketing database. I mean, it, it doesn’t sound like it’s something that I would, you know, push a button and have a, like a cleanup type of function execute, you know, how can you clean a marketing database that has maybe spotty or missing info?
[Tony Romero]: Yeah. You know, the, the main thing there is to be able to identify if you have a current file of your list of customers, you can actually run it through a process to look at it, compare it to data. That’s actually been human verified to make sure it’s the most current, the most correct data. So going through that process of the data hygiene, data appends, or new creation of lists, it’s important to make sure you do that through a service where people have actually human verified, that the data is correct and current.
[Gary Stockton]: So what are some helpful tools for cleansing a marketing database? Any that you’d recommend?
[Tony Romero]: Well, you know, I think the most important thing is number one is to take a look at what’s called data hygiene in order to be able to make sure it’s correct and current there’s also append, which means that you’re identifying data that’s not a part of the current list and make sure that you add that data in. And then lastly, creating a list of lookalike customers. So an example is you might have a list of customers that you’ve identified as being your true ideal target customer. And now you want to be able to find others that are like that. You can work with companies to do what’s called lookalike analysis, to be able to identify your ideal customers and create an expansive, comprehensive list that you can go prospecting to.
[Gary Stockton]: Very interesting. So what recent changes by tech platforms are having an impact on marketing data? I mean, there’s been a lot in the news recently.
[Tony Romero]: Yeah, definitely. You know, first of all, tech platforms are capable of collecting a lot of information on consumers, both through third party cookies and first party cookies, as well as third party data. Now, the interesting thing is that while they’ve been able to collect a lot of data, there’s been a recent shift in the market space in that Google is no longer supporting third-party cookie data. So it’s more important than ever to focus in on the first party cookies. But secondly, third party data is still available. And so there’s companies where you can provide all of these that I just mentioned, the data hygiene, the data append, the list creation that you can add to your first party data in order to come up with a comprehensive marketing lead data list. So those are the main tools to think about. The other thing I’d mentioned about tech platforms is that they’re able to do a lot.
[Tony Romero]: For example, they can provide truly personalized experiences to their customers because they know a lot about their customers. And secondly, they can provide additional capabilities like prequalified loans. So in that perspective, the platform can offer a customer to find out what the loan offers that they qualify for. And they can go through the pre-qual process where they can go find out what offers they qualify for with a soft inquiry. So they’re not getting impacted with a hard pull and then they can find out if they want to move forward with that. And the ideal thing for lenders is that that pre-qual process means that it’s just a soft pull. It’s a pretty low cost. And for people who do apply, there’s a high likelihood that they will be approved for that loan. Wow.
[Gary Stockton]: Well, this has been really great information, Tony, on data cleansing, if you enjoyed this chat and want to go a level deeper, don’t miss Tony’s Sip and Solve webinar, he goes into greater detail on optimizing marketing campaign data. And in our next business chat, we will be continuing the discussion with Tony and focusing on campaign targeting.
