A comprehensive checklist for auditing different customer data types in a CRM or Email marketing system

In today’s world of ever-increasing data availability, volume and variety the challenge to know which data is valuable to you is a key step in starting to build a marketing solution. An often-cited response is that ‘all data is important’ and this may be true, but to help decide which elements are critical in the initial stages of building your solution a method to identify at the value of each type of customer data is key. In this post, I will look at how to audit customer data based on its type and value.  The examples will show why it's important to be selective when reviewing customer data in CRM and Email marketing. Over numerous implementations of Marketing Database solutions, I have seen many types…

Continuing our briefing on how to apply Big Data for Marketing

In the first post in this short series I gave an introduction to using Big Data for marketing.  That introductory post included an overview of the concept and looked at the three core elements Volume, Velocity and Variety. In this second post in the series, I will look at the impact of the increase volumes of data associated with Big Data - what does this mean in practice for real-world marketing? Of the 3 V’s, Volume is the easiest to relate to Big Data, as it is about the amount of data, which as of 2012 stood at ~2.5 zettabytes and is expected to grow to almost 7.9 zettabytes by 2015. It is however a controversial area with many differing opinions on what constitutes ‘big volume’. To my 5 year…