How to select the right data management platform and audience profiling tools for your business

A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a place to store, sort and act upon multiple sources of online and offline data including search, social, display media, Email, CRM, Transactions (e.g. Point-of-sale). This includes first party data which the marketer collects on their site or through other customer interactions and on third party data pre-integrated into the platform, or data purchased from branded providers or lists. They also look to integrate desktop and mobile usage to provide a ‘single view of the prospect and customer’. As such they are also now commonly called Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Identity Management Platforms (IDMP).  Users of a DMP can import known (i.e. an email address) or unknown (e.g. a cookie) data and use this to define audiences or segments. The DMP will then find new customers (i.e. similar audiences)…

The Managing Director of Royal Mail's Data Services shares his insights into the true cost of poor-quality customer data.

As more marketers work to improve ROI and address new data regulations, the true costs of poor-quality customer data are about to become clear New research into the use and management of customer data from Royal Mail Data Services reveals that UK organisations estimate poor-quality customer data is costing them an average of 6% of their annual revenues. So how can marketers and data experts finally clean up their customer data to improve overall operational efficiency and campaign effectiveness and comply with data protection regulations?

Marketers face a data dilemma

Today’s marketers rely on good-quality contact data above all else to ensure the success of a campaign’s performance. Yet despite reporting data quality as having the biggest impact on campaign response and conversion rates,…

Crawl, walk, run: three steps to establishing an effective DMP

As digital marketers we're all too aware of the importance of data. For example, the typical fortune 1000 company that sees a 10% increase in data accessibility generates $65 million in additional revenue, whilst bad or poor quality data costs organisations as much as 10-20% in revenue. Although Big Data is no longer a new area of interest for marketers, the constant change in trends and focus mean that we must always stay up to date, if not one step ahead, of the trends to ensure we hold a competitive advantage. Just consider the sheer complexity of data-related terms: I recently attended a data-driven marketing event run by the Omnicom Group which gave me the opportunity to look at some of the insights and trends from those working at the…

How to make the most out of your company's data

Today’s corporate agendas revolve around the staggering amount of data available and the advanced analytics needed to gather, interpret and use such data. When it comes to Big Data and Advanced Analytics, things can get really tricky for a company not making the best of them. A recent McKinsey report shows that businesses which are not able to leverage Big Data and which fail to achieve performing data management also witness an average of 14% in lost revenues per year. Surprisingly, oil companies, life sciences, and consumer goods make the top three industries where big data and advanced analytics are poorly managed, thus leading to financial losses. As opposed to the McKinsey report, a study coming from MIT and Harvard Business School shows that companies focusing on big data management and advanced analysis witness an increase in revenue of up to 6%…

3 of the most important marketing trends shaping the travel sector in 2017

It is estimated that during 2016, total retail travel sales across the globe will reach $22.049 trillion, up 6.0% from the previous year. According to Statista, by 2019, the online travel industry is forecasted to grow to 762 billion U.S. dollars. Today, the majority of people use different websites during the travel purchase journey, either to find information about a destination, read reviews or to book travel online. August 2016 research published by the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) found that 76% of UK internet users had booked holidays digitally in the past 12 months. In the US, Emarketer estimates that 52% of travel bookers use online platforms to make their bookings. That makes digital marketing techniques like SEO, UX and Social Media Marketing absolutely critical to success in the travel industry. Keeping up with the…

Dirty data leads to costly mistakes. Here's how to prevent them

A co-worker once told me the sort of horror story that causes marketers to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. In a previous position at a large technology company, he and his team generated numerous leads through conferences and trade shows. The field marketing managers would send the leads to their marketing operations team via CSV files, and the operations team would use the information to follow up with these leads. The data came in varied formats and was not always clean or easily segmented. In one unfortunate case, the marketing operations team mistakenly uploaded a file containing 500 software industry leads under the service provider category in their system. The leads were routed into the service provider channel, and all 500 of them received a service provider newsletter rather than a software email. Needless to…

Our interview with Jim Conning, the head of Data Services at Royal Mail

I spoke to Jim Conning, Managing Director of Data Services at Royal Mail about how marketers need to master the use of customer data to deliver the right message at the right time

Q. Personalised messaging based around customer’s life events is a great way to cut through the noise and reach customers in a way that is meaningful to them. Can you give some idea of what capabilities marketers need in place to be able to achieve this kind of messaging?

First and foremost, marketers need to understand the value of their customers’ life events, and what life events are relevant for your business and products. For example, moving home represents a major opportunity for the utilities providers because around 65% of consumers switch…

Marketers need to learn how to master data science to stay ahead

Twenty years ago, marketing was a whole different ballgame. You’d buy a magazine ad or a billboard and hope for results. Today, marketing looks much more like a science; it’s data-driven, precise, and numerically grounded. For example, it’s possible to know how many people landed on your company’s latest blog post last Wednesday, what city each person was located in, and how long each visitor stayed on the page. But just because that information is available doesn’t necessarily make it useful. The current marketing dilemma isn’t in gathering data; rather, it’s sifting through the mountains of minutia without getting buried in a veritable landslide. The challenge of marketers is now fishing for concise, actionable insights in a stream of scrap data. 

Symptoms of Analysis Paralysis

CMOs want quantified, useful information about how customers…

Understand your marketing ROI and use the data to inform your data-driven marketing strategy

While the attraction of data-driven marketing isn’t in doubt, the challenge confronting businesses can be daunting. According to the Q1 2014 Gleanster Research customer experience survey, about eight out of ten senior marketers believe their organisation could be doing a better job of using customer data to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies. But with data-driven marketing involving so many working parts, the end goal can appear unobtainable. To create a data driven strategy, you first need to know how to establish an effective way to measure marketing ROI.

Data-driven measurement

The advent of data-driven marketing should ensure that organisations can not only identify the strategies and campaigns that are most likely to be successful, but also secure buy-in and investment for marketers by demonstrating the potential ROI of impending campaigns. Put simply, if a marketing department is truly data-driven, the measurement of…

It's all about the story...

It’s a jungle out there, dog eat dog, and unstructured data is proliferating at an exponential rate. As a marketer you have to be careful, you don’t want to get sucked into this digital Wild West, even the quickest out there could get stung. Yet, there are opportunities to be had, little nuggets of 24-carat gold that can provide your business with a cutting edge worth millions. Sounds like an opportunity, right? However, just as the prospectors found it tough trying to make a buck during the 19th century Alaskan gold rush so businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to make sense of how to make big data pay. So even at this early stage of its evolution businesses are asking, what does the future of big data look like? Image/Copyright Source: wikimedia.org There isn’t an easy answer but…