Creating a robust and precise marketing database is critical for developing the strategies you need to maximize sales. In fact, 33% of quality marketers say having the right tools for data collection is “the most useful” factor in accurately understanding their customers’ needs and wants. Meanwhile, Forbes notes companies that adopt a data-driven marketing approach report far greater engagement with their target audience.
With so much customer demographic and behavioral data available, Sabal Group believes that information should be used to create more effective target lists of potential customers. Here are our top three secrets to perfecting your marketing database list to improve decision-making and develop a marketing strategy targeting not the masses, but the people who are qualified, interested, and ready to hear about your products and services.
1. Maintain Accurate Data
One of the most critical aspects of creating an effective list is maintaining complete, accurate, and up-to-date records in your database. Believe it or not, more than 30% of contact data decays annually. Data changes because lives change: People move, change phone numbers, or change their email addresses. And often, you are the last person they tell.
So how does a marketer stay on top of this decaying data dilemma? Well, the truth is that many don’t. However, providing the latest and most precise information sets Sabal Group apart. Sabal Group’s data scientists pull information from a wide variety of trustworthy sources that continuously review and update their findings. Protecting our partners from the inaccuracies of 10-year-old government census data is crucial to our unique approach. Put simply, when the data is current and accurate, you get better results.
2. Organize Your Information
It’s about more than having a wealth of healthy, up-to-date data. It’s about having organized, up-to-date data. Only when your data is properly filtered and structured can it deliver a true and clear picture of your target audience, their background, lifestyle, interests, and finances.
It’s important to keep in mind an effective marketing database orbits completely around the customer. A good litmus test of whether your information is up to the task of informing your marketing strategies is: “Can I look at this data and connect it to a real potential customer?”
If your list isn’t properly organized, grouped, and defined, it probably includes duplicate, misleading, or unfocused data, which undermines your ability to develop successful marketing initiatives and budgets.
3. Accurately Analyze the Data
The third critical secret to Sabal Group’s method is how we review and respond to post-campaign data. We carefully measure campaign performance and take a close look at how people have responded to different marketing strategies. Then we take what we’ve gleaned from the results of this analysis and put it back into our list building. This way, we’re able to develop an increasingly clear and accurate picture of the people you need to be speaking with.
We can’t overstate the importance of an ongoing process for study, evaluation, and improvement: Our list building, data collection, and analysis generally adds between 20% and 80% to lead generation over the first campaign cycle.
The world’s most coveted resource is no longer oil. It’s data. And with so much of it available, it’s imperative marketers source and utilize their information in the best way possible, and to stay ahead of the competition. Creating a clean list by ensuring your data is accurate is essential. Equally important is filtering and structuring your data so all the relevant information is captured. Finally, closely monitoring your campaign results is crucial to improving your understanding of which individuals were responsive to your strategies, so you can better refine and interpret your target list in the future.
If you’d like to see our strategies put to the test for your next campaign, reach out to Maribeth today!
