Mastering a marketing database that generates leads and turns them into customers

Build it and they will come? Not quite. Building your marketing database is just the first step towards turning your email marketing data into a truly effective lead generation tool.

Building your marketing database can be a complex and time consuming task. It involves bringing together disparate data points from around your organisation, standardising them, removing overlap and potentially supplementing with data from third party sources. A considerable task in itself, and one we talk about in much more detail here.

Once you’ve taken those steps to establish a high quality database, you’re very firmly on the right track. But modern digital marketing databases have so much more potential. The best marketing databases can be built to improve your communications, not just act as a channel for them. Through sophisticated segmentation and automation, you can hit the right prospects, at the right time, through the right channel.

The right prospects

We’ve long been able to profile customers by segmenting data by industry or contact type. But now, profiling is becoming increasingly sophisticated, which means you can get to know customers better than ever, and tailor your communications with more precision. With more data available on your prospects, however, it becomes more important to manage it effectively.

Managing customer data effectively now means two things:

1. Ensuring you keep a complete and current view of each customer
2. Ensuring how you use it is compliant

The right time

Now that you can paint such a vivid picture of each customer, you have the opportunity to communicate with them more effectively. But with great data comes great responsibility: you have to manage your communications more carefully.

Examining your contacts’ digital behaviour by analysing how they react to campaigns, will mean you can avoid sending them too many emails, which is likely to turn them off. It also means you can refine what you send to them based on the topics they’ve been interested in before.

Accurately and actively understanding your customers helps build stronger, more productive relationships. It helps you understand the customer journey and develop knowledge and insights for customer and prospect strategies. This is one of our specialties at Data HQ, and we can include elements such as acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell, test and learn.

The right channel

Another consideration is communicating through the right channel. For example, if a prospect has entered your website through Twitter, they have indicated a preference for social media and the sort of content that’s relevant for those channels. So, you can assume they’ll like to keep receiving blogs from you rather than thick product brochures, for example.

Again, understanding channel preference and the customer journey, coupled with an assessment of a prospect’s areas of interest can inform the development of a really accurate, multi-channel strategy.

The right approach for your marketing database

Understanding the customer journey and developing a data and automation strategy that aligns to it is the key to building and maintaining effective customer relationships. Automating the process customers ensures you will reach the right people, at the right time, with the right messages.

Of course, if you’re lacking time or resources, developing your strategy, never mind automating it, can be challenging. At Data HQ, we provide strategic data solutions that look at the full picture for you, so you can enjoy a single, unified view of your database.

Whatever your area of need, from establishing good data hygiene habits, to evolving your segmentation, to automating your approach, we can help. One of our friendly experts would be glad to discuss your needs and craft a solution that meets the needs of your business.