Are You Using Effective Mailing Lists to Feed Intelligent Marketing?

Our recent articles have focused around Insight, Analysis and Automation within Marketing. All are vital tools for the modern marketer, but none can be effective without a clean, well-managed customer and prospect database. So let’s get back to basics…

Customer Data & Existing Prospect Data

The data you hold on your Customers is the key to understanding your target markets. Using Insight & Analysis techniques, this data can help you identify the prospects most likely to purchase from you in the future. However, this will be truly effective only if you hold detailed, consolidated information on your clients.

To facilitate this, and to ensure that the data you hold on your existing customers and prospects is as accurate, complete and up-to-date as possible, there are various ways you can achieve that objective:

• Data Quality Auditing – review the accuracy of the data you already hold and identify any gaps;
• Cleansing – clean and upgrade the quality of your database or mailing list;
• Customer Profiling – understand your customers better to find more prospects like them;
• Single Customer View – improve your insight by bringing together data from multiple sources.

Costs of these techniques vary from completely free to higher cost, but all will be useful. So by undertaking those your budget will allow can vastly improve your campaign results.

Sourcing New Prospect Data

Specific campaigns and projects often require additions to your existing data. The best way to do that is to source a new list of prospect data. This will be easier and more effective if you have first gained insight into your clients, using some or all of the above techniques.

When sourcing new data there are some fundamental elements to consider:

• What information can you give the list seller – what criteria of persons/businesses are you looking to target? (informed by your insight if available);
• Is the supplier you are speaking to a member of the DMA?
• Does the supplier have additional accreditations and do they provide testimonials and case studies from existing clients?
• Where is the data sourced, how is it collated and how is the data kept clean and up-to-date?
• Can the supplier drill into and segment the data they are supplying, to give you the best possible criteria?
• Will the supplier de-dupe your existing database against the data you are buying? (thereby ensuring you are not paying for contacts you already have)
• Do they enquire into your business, services, products, existing insight and objectives? (To help them match the most targeted and relevant data to your campaign)
• Does the supplier ask about the channels you are planning for the campaign?
• Can they add value to the campaign in more ways than just supplying data?

Making sure you source and maintain high quality data and mailing lists for your campaigns may seem like a pretty obvious requirement, but just one of the above elements missed and the detrimental effect on the success of your campaign could be drastic.

• Have you seen improved results when auditing, cleansing and profiling your existing data?
• Have you ever sourced data and felt the company did not try to understand your requirements?
• What else do you look for in a data supplier?