Your Best Friend: Excel
* You’re not in accounts, but you spend hours and hours on Excel.
* You can spot an email address that ends with “co.u” from 50 paces.
* You know VLOOKUPs and advanced filter techniques.
* You may be using Excel plug-ins and freeware tools, and feeling a bit flash and a little bit smug.
But, while Excel has always been a great tool for marketers, you might be feeling it’s getting a bit out of control...
Problems around data proliferation are often making marketing people less effective and turning them into data administrators rather than revenue driving, ROI-measurable, marketing folks. That is very bad news for your business.
So how did it happen, why is it a problem and what can you do about it?
How did this happen?
Back in the not-too-distant past, typically, there were specialists who managed your data. Fulfilment teams and data bureaux carried out your data management. Data contained names and addresses, and often job titles and company names too. This data was kept clean and up-to-date because of the way it was mailed regularly. It contained segmentation information and was carefully entered into databases from pieces of paper, by people tasked with maximising the quality.
All this activity and much more, supported a relatively happy data cycle. Then, large and rapidly expanding publishers found they had data proliferation problems and had to tackle the problem early. Many of them implemented large data warehouse and database projects that cost millions and took years. These were and still are, well beyond the means of many, many businesses and even for the large ones, they are massive and long term investments.
And then… along came the internet. And boy, has that changed things.
Reduction in Data Entry Quality
The initial joy of reducing the costs of re-keying has slowly been replaced by the pain of seeing databases filled with “Mickey Mouse” of “toyland” or “asdfpoaubiv” from “Afghanistan” but, of course, with an entirely accurate, Hotmail address. No one likes filling in webforms. It’s slow; you don’t want those pesky marketers to start sending you spam; you just want to grab what you need and run and preferably hide. Those neatly completed subs forms are long gone.
So, data quality became harder to control and a whole new industry bent on improving your data quality, sprang up.
Proliferation of Databases
More recently, new ways of creating databases appeared. I could stop writing now and in twenty minutes, have created a web-based database, with an online form, on our website, complete with picklists, drop downs etc and all easily downloaded to Excel for analysis and transfer to other systems.
It has never been so easy to capture data. So what have we been doing? Bashing them out all over the place.
Take a consultancy firm such as ours... established in 2008, we have four databases already. Outlook, CRM, email marketing, website … and as I write, I realise there are at least four more including lists in Excel, and that’s only counting contact databases.
A database used to be a really big deal. Hard to create, it needed people to take the information from paper and type it into the system. They had large infrastructure requirements and seemed to always need more. IT seemed to be always asking for more and better servers. Now databases are everywhere, easily set up by laymen and storage is cheap.
This is an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do. You can create data capture points and not have a person involved with getting it into a database. It can be stored securely, managed, analysed, backed up and its contents used, at very low cost and effort. This is a revolution for marketers and businesses. It enables agility and flexibility in a way that was unknown before.
But it’s solved one problem, created great opportunity and given us a whole new set of problems too.
The Resulting Problems
The reduction in data quality means we know less about the people behind our data, so our targeting is weaker. It is harder to connect and analyse what information we do have, because unique identifying information (such as name and address) is not present in all the databases. (Email address is not, contrary to what you might expect, a good connector for data.) It’s therefore harder to profile our customers and prospects and to go after more, good, similar leads.
And think about what this is doing for your analysis. One person with three email addresses, gets a campaign three times, responds once and you think you’ve got a response rate of 33% rather than 100% and a universe of three, rather than one. And you keep pursuing those other two imaginary people, annoying the person who has already bought and wasting your own time. It is not unusual for 35% of your customers to have opted out of receiving emails and many of those to have opted out of marketing altogether… think about that and how it impacts your ability to cross-sell / upsell and retain customers.
And now, to make things harder, the internet is raising more possibilities...
Social Media and Data that’s “Out There”
Just when we thought we had enough data, marketers are faced with the data that’s “out there”: social media, online data providers (Hoovers, Jigsaw and their like).
These are databases too and some of them are your databases. With our Twitter followers, LinkedIn contacts, eAcademy, Plaxo, Spoke … we have at least twenty databases and counting.
It’s very exciting, like being in a sweetie shop when you don’t have a bag. Furthermore you suspect you’re only allowed to look at the sweets, not touch, or the data protection commissioner will be after you.
So, what to do?
Don’t panic. Faced with this chaos, people start to think they need to put all the data into one database, merged, deduped and cleaned and everything will be OK. And then are overwhelmed by what that might entail.
Whether that will make everything OK, depends a great deal on the company, its data, how it sells its products and services and what it wants to achieve. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked first.
But either way, it is very, very hard to do quickly and cost effectively. For smaller and mid-sized businesses, it’s not the cost of the software so much as the internal resources and time it takes up that makes it hard. And times have changed. If you embark on a project that will take two years, even one year, your requirements will probably have changed by the time it’s completed. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan two years ahead. It’s just how you implement that plan that needs to be different.
Thinking Time
There are many ways to tackle the problem and the starting point is almost always, giving yourself time to think, make a plan and carry it out. There is a wide range of increasingly affordable software available to help you manage, sort, and use your data. The trick is working out what you want to achieve, not being overly ambitious and not being seduced by software features that you don’t need, nor will ever use.
Use a Framework for your Thinking
Find some time to look at the data you have right now. Find out where it is and what sort of shape it’s in. Look at it, sort it, filter it. Judge its quality and usefulness. Think about where the data is, that you want to get your hands on. How you can get it. What you’re going to do with it when you have it. Think about which data is more valuable to you and how you want to use it.
To structure your thinking about the next steps, and your plan of action, try using a framework. You might, for example, apply some sales process thinking. Many sales teams work with a “suspect > prospect > lead > customer” sales process. Try categorising your data into these groups and then try moving people, using sales and marketing, from one group to the next and into one data source that you know is of higher quality.
Tools and Software
You don’t have to have a data warehouse or CRM with all your databases feeding in and everyone working out of it, to be able to see what you’ve got and use it better. But you probably do need some sort of tool. Once you’ve done your thinking, you will probably have a better idea of what tool that is. You may indeed need a single system containing all your data, but you may just need an analysis tool or the services of an analyst, to draw together your data and make intelligent decisions. You may want to keep all your databases separate and just put the data together easily for campaigns without copying and pasting into Excel.
Whatever you need, it is important to realise, you do not have to take all the fields, in all your databases, merge / purge them and create one database, with one “record” per contact, in order to be effective. There is a difference between “merging” data into another database, with rules about which data overwrites which data and other complexities, versus “showing” many data sources in one application.
So, if you find yourself faced with data quality and proliferation problems, find the time to do the thinking, make a plan and find the tools that will help you work intelligently not harder. By making good use of the tools and software available, you might find you want to add more databases rather than stop the proliferation. And it may open up opportunities to use the sweetie shop too.
