The growth of your business is highly dependent on the quality of the data you keep about any contacts you’ve had with prospects, customers and others. Big data can be extremely helpful to you for marketing purposes. Perhaps you are fairly organized and have this data managed in an orderly manner with CRM software or by other means. That said, you still need to ensure that this CRM data is not incomplete or suffering from other potential problems. The following are some issues that may be handled with data appending services of the type we offer at Marc Publishing.
Data Overload
Having too much data may not seem like a problem at first glance, but it can be a major issue. Big data is extremely useful for enabling you to tailor marketing campaigns. That said, having reams of data to comb through for information that’s relevant for current marketing purposes is either going to be a waste of your time or your money if you end up having to pay someone else to sort through it all.
Insufficient or Incomplete Data
The opposite of the problem just discussed is that of not having enough data. You may have numerous contacts that you only have a partial email address for or perhaps a phone number with no area code. Incomplete home addresses are another variety of this problem. There are also instances where you won’t have some of this information at all.
At Marc Publishing, this is the type of data problem that businesses such as yours frequently contact us to handle. You may have the person’s address and phone number but no email address. Our data appending service is excellent at filling in such gaps in your prospect and customer lists.
Conflicting Data
If you’ve been in business for many years, you’ll find you’ve collected a fair amount of contact and other information on prospects and customers. Because people move or change phone numbers or email addresses, you may find that some of this information is in conflict.
As an example, they may have used one email address when placing an order and another one when they subscribed to your newsletter. Is the more recent email a replacement of the previous one or simply an additional email account? These apparent conflicts need to be resolved accurately, so you have up-to-date contact information but also benefit from multiple contact methods if both of them are still accurate.
Unorganized Data
This is a problem that customer relationship management software can help you resolve. CRM data is typically organized so you can find certain types of information when you need it. Not having it all organized in CRM software or some separate database makes your big data useless to you, which will cost you sales and revenue and maybe even your business if you don’t rectify the problem.
Incorrect Data
In addition to incomplete data, this is another area where our data appending service at Marc Publishing can really help you out. Especially in the case of prospects or customers who haven’t had a contact with you in over a year or more, you need to have the accuracy of their information confirmed. Do they still live at the same address? If they don’t, then sending them that mailing piece will be a complete waste of money.
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